2006-03-22
I saw it called "ingestion" in a book (Bruce Fraser's Real World Camera Raw), which I thought was a new term at the time, but since then I've learned that indeed that's what it's called.
I used to use various apps to ingest my images. Sometimes whatever the OS had, sometimes Nikon software, sometimes iPhoto (on a Mac), but it always bothered me that if I erased the card I would only have one copy in the computer, so I used to leave the images on the card. Which, of course, meant that I ingested the old ones a second time when I ingested again.
Then I started to get interested in converting my raw images to DNGs (Adobe's Digital Negative format), and I realized that, since I wanted to keep the original raws, I could arrange things so that the originals were the backups. It's too complicated to explain quickly, but if you click on the ImageIngester link at the left you'll see a diagram that explains the whole thing.
So, that was the motivation for ImageIngester. It senses that the card has been mounted, copies the images from the card to a backup drive (a Firewire external, in my case), renames the files to include the date and a sequence number, runs the raws through Adobe's DNG Converter, verifying them in the process, and independently verifies JPEGs by decompressing them. Then it puts the final images in a folder tree organized by year and date. (There are a few more options, but you get the idea.)
I think it's great, but, of course, I wrote it for me. We'll see what other people think...