As promised, I will dig into the use of a Digital Asset Management software (DAM). Remember, Louise and I are simply amateurs, keen on shooting pictures.

With over 250,000 picture (and video) files in our library, plus 26,000 in the Zenfolio website, our questions were:

• Do we have duplicates - identical file content, with different names? Yes over 11,000 were found using the DAM application
• Do we have JPGS which have been created along with the RAW, but not 'attached' with it? (thousands...)
• Do we have multiple iterations of the same RAW or Scan being postprocessed time and time over. (In the old days, changes were NOT a recipe, like today and it was valuable to save these iterations.) Still counting.
• Do we have pictures identified as 2007-08-01, say, stored in the 2017 folder? 
• Have all the Folders been identified? i.e, is 2006-07-14-XX_1_a a proper way to describe its contents?
• Are all the 'worth publishing' pictures in Zenfolio? Are they properly organized, in Zenfolio? For example, Gallery 1998-09-01 Trip to Hawaii may contain images from 1999-02-09 Trip to Muskoka. 
• Is it a good time to discard the really 'bad' ones?

The DAM software gives us tools to figure out some responses to these questions. Over time, we had a tendency to focus on the folder by year organization, missing the 'overall' picture, so to speak. For example, a visit to Quebec City may have taken place between December 24th and January 6th. The by year folder makes the sorting of this trip tricky. (Maybe using the year when the trip started is a good choice?)

The DAM I selected has a few nice tools, like face recognition and GPS coordinates resolution. On a fast system, the filtering is almost instant and provides a view of your selection, no matter how complex is the search.

Do you need, as an amateur, such software? Were you so well organized over time that you have no dupes, you know where your pictures are etc.?

We did not feel such a need until we realized that we had lost pictures and videos. Suffice to say that using backups and safe storage, we are able to 'retrieve' most of the losses. The DAM became invaluable in getting us back to a semblancy of organized data.

Like any tools, there is a learning curve. Is it worth the efforts? For us it is.

Next time, I will review the steps from acquiring pictures/videos to finalizing a Zenfolio Gallery/Collection.