Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Works-for-Me Wednesday: Organizing Digital Photographs

When I made the switch from a film camera to a digital camera about a year and a half ago, I had no idea how quickly the digital photos would take over my computer! When I didn’t have to worry about running out of film, I found myself taking 5 times the number of pictures I had taken with my film camera. In no time I had a huge mess of pictures, with no good way of finding the pictures I needed without weeding through the entire bunch. I found a couple of free programs that have helped me immensely in my quest to organize my photos: Irfanview and Picasa. When I transfer my pictures from my camera to the computer, I put them in a folder labeled “Uploaded”. Then I use Irfanview’s “Batch Rename/Conversion” feature to rename my pictures in yyyy-mm-dd-event-## format. I set up Irfanview to automatically move my pictures to the appropriate month/year folder on my computer after the pictures are renamed. I like to organize my photos by the year. Then in the individual year folders, I have sub-folders for each month. Once that is done, I load up Picasa. Picasa scans my pictures folder for any new pictures and automatically imports them. I make minor adjustments to the pictures and add keywords. The keywords I usually use are the names of the people in the picture and the event. With the keywords, I can search for pictures when I’m making a gift calendar or album. If I need a picture of Liz and Sam together, I search for “Liz Sam”, and all the pictures featuring both kids pop up. Very convenient. Once all the pictures are tweaked to my liking, I use Picasa to upload them to the photo-printing company of my choice. I use Shutterfly, but there are many great companies out there, and Picasa supports most of them. When Shutterfly offers a free-shipping promotion, I order the prints. I also use Picasa to burn CDs of my pictures every 3 months, so I have a backup. And always, always, always make sure you backup your pictures. Our computer crashed a few months ago, and we only lost a few pictures, because I had backed them all up a week before. I know I could buy a great program to edit and organize my pictures, but the free programs work for me! For more Works-for-Me tips, head over to Rocks in My Dryer! Related Tags: , ,

3 comments:

Laurel said...

thanks - we may have to try these! i like the "tag" idea...

carrie said...

Thanks dearie...I'm currently downloading the Google Pack....I finally decided to organize my photobucket album cuz I was tired of going thru pages and pages and stuff...LOL!!!

Jodi Jean said...

wow, great tip. i've just run into the problem of organizing my photos. i'm looking into picasa as i type. interesting.