Software

What Soft­ware to Choose for Den­tal Pic­ture Man­age­ment and Editing?

Over the last 6 years in den­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, I have found that SOFTWARE is a much greater chal­lenge than the choice of cam­era, lens, flash, or even basic set­tings.  Why?  Because while the fun­da­men­tals of pho­tog­ra­phy don’t change, soft­ware changes every year, and some­times more often than that!  Not only that, there is a huge range of soft­ware choices avail­able, and that’s AFTER you’ve decided if you’ll use your den­tal prac­tice man­age­ment soft­ware or not.

When it comes to choos­ing the right soft­ware to man­age your photo cat­a­log, there are two basic choices:

• Den­tal Prac­tice Man­age­ment Soft­ware, i.e. Open Den­tal, Eagle­soft, Den­trix, Curve, etc
• Pho­tog­ra­phy soft­ware, i.e. Adobe Pho­to­shop, Gimp (free­ware), Apple Aper­ture, XARA, and many more.

While I could give a mod­er­ately com­plete review of the abil­i­ties and lim­i­ta­tions of all of them, that would be a big waste of time for one very sim­ple rea­son: almost all dental-specific soft­ware has so many lim­i­ta­tions in terms of edit­ing and cat­a­loging, that there is not really a good rea­son to con­sider them in my not-so-very-humble opin­ion. There IS one pro­gram that I will be test­ing soon that may prove me wrong, and I will absolutely give a thor­ough review of it once I’ve had the chance to play with it.

Why Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room for Den­tal Photo Catalogs

I dis­cussed this topic in Feb­ru­ary 2010 here, but I’d like to con­tinue with rea­sons I use Pho­to­shop Light­room for all my cur­rent home and pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phy cat­a­logs and give some screen­shots that will show more detail.  Here’s a screen­shot of the usual start­ing screen in Light­room, the Library module.

Let’s look at the col­ored boxes on the two sides closer-up:

#1 Man­ag­ing Mul­ti­ple Fold­ers On Mul­ti­ple Drives:

Over time, one can accum­mu­late a very large cat­a­log of images, and backup becomes crit­i­cal.  Light­room allows one to man­age pho­tos across mul­ti­ple dri­ves, both inter­nal and exter­nal, even on your office server.  My brother-in-law is a wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher, and he has 6 1-TB exter­nal HDs con­nected to his Mac, and Light­room eas­ily allows him to view all of them.  You can most any­thing from here that you would do from Win­dows Explorer: move images or fold­ers, set up a folder struc­ture for easy orga­ni­za­tion, etc.

#2 Cre­ate Cus­tomized Col­lec­tions & Smart Galleries

Light­room lets you cre­ate cus­tomized col­lec­tions, which is won­der­ful for putting together groups of pho­tos that you may want for show­cas­ing, print­ing, putting on the web, etc.  You can make these “Smart” Col­lec­tions by set­ting rules that will go through all the tags you apply to pho­tos and auto­mat­i­cally add them to the appro­pri­ate col­lec­tion based on those criteria.

#3 Pub­lish­ing Services

This is one of the most pow­er­ful parts of Light­room IMO!  You can set up links within LR to a num­ber of social media sites such as those shown here.  I don’t have these set as they are in my work backup cat­a­log on my home PC — they’re all work­ing at the office.  But with these, it is as easy to upload pho­tos to these sites as high­light­ing the ones you want, drag­ging them to the Pub­lish Ser­vice you want, and click­ing the Pub­lish but­ton (after they’re set up, of course).

Basic Edit­ing & Key­word Tagging

Look­ing at the oppo­site side, you see where you can start doing some basic edit­ing and key­word tag­ging, and for many den­tists, this may be all you need, depend­ing on how con­sis­tent you are when you take the pic­tures.  It can take a lit­tle bit to set up a key­word hier­ar­chy, and it’s not uncom­mon to go back and clear out dupli­cates and find you need to reor­ga­nize, but it’s not all that hard.

(more info com­ing soon)