Hi Ben,

Thanks for starting this discussion. It's interesting to read the different approaches/requirements that people have for versioning.

In my case, I've pretty much settled on a system that is somewhat similar to your own. Namely, I assign categories only to originals (which, depending on camera and whether they're digital captures or film scans, can be RAW, TIFF, or JPEG in format). All edits are assigned only a "derived version" category, and they are also renamed with a suffix indicating that they are non-originals.

I want my searches to ONLY return the originals, but then also indicate which of those originals I've already worked with (in other words, indicate which originals have one or more derived versions). Your method seems to accomplish that quite nicely, although I have yet to experiment with your script that gives a colored label to the "originals having versions".....I'll do that once I finally finish the lengthy task of assigning categories to all the originals in my database.

I do not think I would create JPEGs to serve as placeholders for all the RAW originals (even though that would be a tremendous savings in hard drive space), because most often when I'm doing a search I may then want to actually do some editing on the found originals, and I'd rather not go through the hassle of retrieving them from offline storage. (If you see what I mean.)

I'll be eager to read further replies to this thread, as I find this whole discussion very helpful.

Best wishes,

David