It's my last day

I actually only have a few more hours left of the day! Today is my last day as Assistant Photo Editor for University Marketing and Communications (it sounds fancier than it is). Right now I should be finishing an Archives photo project, but after working on it all year and through the summer, I barely have 30% of the images needed.

One of the tasks that I have to do as a Photo Editor is create collections for people, departments, and internal and external publications. Sorting through the millions (literally) of images and picking the best as requested is my job. I don't get to use Photoshop (or only rarely), or even hold a camera (except to clean it). Instead, I sort and manage all of the files on the school server, optimizing metadata, making collections, and deleting any duplicates or terrible images. Something else I do is sort "black holes" in the database of images.

<!--more-->A Black Hole for us is an assortment of hundreds or even thousands of files without any metadata (defining elements) and no obvious information to go by. Example: a box of discs full of files is given to me to sort and make searchable within Cumulus, the software we use. I don't know who donated the discs/files, I don't know when they are from, I don't know who is in them or what the events are, and sometimes they aren't even in jpg format. The last black hole I had to sort through took half of a fall semester of looking, scanning, and staring at images until SOMETHING stood out as identifiable. A calendar in the background (Semester), snow on the ground (Winter), an instrument somewhere (Band).

But today, I'm working on a collection for the library archives. I'm putting together approximately 150 of the best images from 2010, out of 50,000. Which is insane. I have perhaps 3 hours to finish something that has taken me all year to only get a few. After that, I'll be done with this, done with this job, and on to getting my car out of the fake parking spot and speeding home.

Programs: Cumulus, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Finder (there's a lot more to do in Finder than you think!)

Experience: Photo editing and management, working with clients, preparing images for web and print publications, working in a university setting, working in archives.