I’m a bit of an organization freak… love labeling my artfiles, archiving my artwork in nicely wrapped packages, and keeping track in a spreadsheet the status of my illustrations (i.e. Sold, Available, Copyright ownership, Royalties earned on each, etc). That being said, a spreadsheet has its lacks in that it’s just a bunch of text, and colour coding is a pretty limited way of visually organizing the images. I wanted something visual and searchable.

So I don’t know why I didn’t think earlier of using iPhoto to create a visual, searchable catalogue of my illustrations… and since that epiphany, I’m in illustration cataloguing heaven!

What I love in particular is the tagging feature… I’ve probably created 2 dozen tags to describe the medium (watercolour, pencil, oil,) style (whimsical, traditional), subject matter (christmas, animals, wedding), year created, and clients for my illustrations. As I add new illustrations, I tag them (see below).

That way if I’m quoting for a client who is interested in my floral illustrations, I just do a search for “floral” (shown below) and all my illustrations tagged with “floral” pop up and I can quickly browse through to find what I need.

As well as the tagging options, you can rate your illustrations with a star system… pretty cool if you’re wanting to browse just what you deem is your best work for your portfolio. And like most photo programs, you can create albums… I’ve got a Portfolio album, so I can quickly browse through that for my best work when sending samples & quotes to clients.