Cleaning out some images that I have saved in my Downloads today, but I want to move them into a proper workflow somehow. But I don’t know how. As of right now, they are scattered in DevonThink or some random folder. But how to make good use of them for recall?
Many times, I will collect a few images that I want to use somewhere or could be used down the line in something instructional.
This is the classic knowledge management taxonomy conundrum. It is not particularly related to images, it is related to knowledge management and thus either:
you classify the images beforehand, and that takes you to the classic “tags vs folders” discussion, PARA, and whatnot.
or drop them into a folder and when the time comes you search them using some kind of image-recognition enabled solution (I think perhaps Devonthink should be able to do this, or is it limited to OCR on PDFs?)
I accumulate many of these types of images and because I’m an “archivist” type person, I use folders for this. So I first ask myself: “Where would I go looking for this thing?” and I put it in that folder. If I have any doubt like “this could belong in this folder, and this other one, and this other one”, I ruthlessly duplicate, storage is cheap (at least for my volume of work).
For the record, I also use Evernote as a ultimate resort, so those images will also go to Evernote as a total junk space that somehow magically seems to always work when searching.
My approach is a little different than the others. I keep all such images in a Photos album called “Presentation-Images-Videos.” I add descriptive keywords to each image in the Info field so that I can find the appropriate image or images as needed. This way, all of my images are in one place—Photos—clearly named and with as many keywords as necessary to ensure I can find them.
For example, in the Presentation-Images-Videos album, I have this image along with the words I will most likely need to find it.
