From 3.6 to Imatch 5

[cthomas]

I'm moving my images from IMatch 3.6 where I didn't have any Keywords or Meteadata attached to any of the images. Now when I add the images to IMatch 5. Would now be a good time to add  Keywords and/or Metadata to my Images?

[Richard]

Hi Carl,

The best time to add keywords is when you need them. What benefit will you derive from having keywords in your files? Unless you have good reason to increase the complexity of your database apply the KISS principle. (Keep It Selectively Simple)

[Panther]

I agree with Richard - no point in doing it if you don't need it.  I just moved from version 3.6 to 5 over the past few weeks.  Most of my images were scanned from old photos and letters and stuff, so there weren't any keywords or metadata in the files (I had only used categories and the title/description fields in my 3.6 database).

In the process of playing around with the new version 5 I started reading/learning about metadata, so I have used this opportunity to add a little bit of metadata into some of my files.  I've found it convenient to be able to use the author and date created metadata fields for the images scanned from letters in particular.  It's pretty easy to do in version 5, and it let me add some utility and search capabilities I hadn't used and didn't have in my old 3.6 version.  It also gave me something useful to do while I played around with learning various aspects of the new version, so I could figure out whether I might want to alter my workflow process a bit before I resume scanning a bunch of new documents into the database.  But I agree with Richard that I wouldn't do it just because of the version change, unless I had some other reason to want to do it.

[Ferdinand]

I will make two comments.

1.  Generally, entering metadata is easier in V5 than V3.6, so I found that it's easier to do this after migration than before.

2.  I try to enter metadata progressively.  If you let a backlog build up then it becomes rather tedious to enter it all.