Looking through the forum, I have noticed some frustration by beginners. Just let it be known I am an absolute beginner with KM. As of writing this, I have been using KM for less than 3 days.
You (and I) are here because we had a problem to solve. One by which prebuilt solutions are not satisfactory. No?
Often our problem we need to solve is complex and not really suited to learning a whole new paradigm.
So, here is the advice:
Pick something that is stupid easy for you to do. But, you do it a lot. I mean a whole lot, to where if you added up all the time that you do it, it eats up a ton of time.
Solve it. By doing so, it will save you time and that time can now be given to you to solve other (simple for now) problems which will intern save more time. So on and so fourth. All the while, keeping in mind your original reason for being here. If need be, solve parts of that problem as you go by solving smaller but similar issues.
Step by step saving time and giving you time to save more time. Here is the power of the paradigm KM gives us.
I am an industrial designer by training and trade. Not a programmer. Though, I have had to solve other problems in the past which brought me to learn a little bit about Python. Am I good enough to make a living from coding? Hell no! But, with it, I can make my CAD software do things the developers didn't think of or at least hadn't thought it was worth including into their system.
Here is an example of how I am using KM:
Over the last 30 years, I have collected probably in the range of 100's of thousands of inspirational images. As for each project, I have done an image search. I like to organize the images in such a way as to keep it generic not necessarily project specific. To date, I have not run across a great Digital Asset manager that works the way I do. Most are made for the content creators to keep organized. Though far from perfect, was iView Media Pro. Ceased development and no longer works with the current operating system. So, I was looking for solutions and came across KM.
Here is a simple use of KM. While slogging through hundreds or thousands of images at a time. I have set the 10 key pad to assign Finder tags to the images. I use these tags as temporary sorting categories these categories are flexible and in my head as well as they are temporary.
I can now fly through the images just tagging them with the keyboard instead of ctrl-clicking and then clicking on the tag that I want the photo to have. It is also faster than dragging and dropping the image into the folder that I want it sorted to one at a time.
Then, I can sort by tags and batch move them to where they need to go all at once.
I have also, made the 10 key pad move files into pre-sort folders.
For now, there is a still a lot that I am doing manually, or in my head to keep track of things. But as I get better at KM, this system will get more effective. And, I have a lot more time to solve these other problems... Just because I can Tag image files with a single key stroke.
As soon as I can figure out how to post a macro, I will add them to this topic.
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