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October 20, 2006
Picture Me Organized
Dear Larry,
I’m really getting into digital photography now, but at the
same time, I find I’m overrun with pictures on my computer with no real sense of
organization. Any suggestions?
P. H.
Dear P. H.,
I remember a day when our bookshelves were overrun with photo
albums. They still are, but these days, all the new photos are filling up a hard
drive instead of a shelf.
Organization is everything when it comes to your precious
photographs. To begin with, invest the time and organize at the folder level
within Windows. If all of your pictures are not already in your My Pictures
folder, move them there. Then employ a consistent naming convention for all your
folders. My recommendation is to name each folder with the year, month, and day
of the event followed by a description. For example, “2006-06-25 Baby naming for
Rachel” or “2005-04-08 Mary’s birthday party” or “2004-11-17 Vacation in the
Bahamas.” By following this convention, your picture folders will be organized
and sorted chronologically.
If you’re not already viewing your folders with thumbnails on,
try it out. Thumbnails of folders display a sampling of pictures within the
folder. Thumbnails of photos themselves display a mini version of the photo. To
turn thumbnail view on for any folder, click View, Thumbnails in the menu bar.
By the way, if you’re not happy with the pictures that show up
on a folder thumbnail, right-click the folder icon, then click Properties and
Customize; then you can select which picture is displayed within the folder
thumbnail icon.
Next, use a good program to further organize, manage, and edit
your photos. A very good choice is Google’s Picasa—not only is it pretty easy to
use, it’s free! Visit
http://picasa.google.com to download and install it. Among its many
features, Picasa allows you to organize your photos into virtual folders called
“albums” ( “labels” in older versions of Picasa). Photos are physically
organized into folders on your hard drive, but within Picasa, you can also
create these albums to organize pictures in other ways. For example, you can
click File, New Album and create an album called Baby Sarah. Then drag every
picture of Sarah that you have into this new virtual album. The pictures remain
in the folders in which they already reside; however, they’ll also appear in the
new album as well. This way, not only can you find your pictures of Sarah in the
chronological folders, but you’ll also be able to see them in one central
location: your new album. It may look to you as if you now have multiple copies
of the same picture, but you don’t; Picasa is simply allowing you to organize
your pictures in different ways.
Last but not least, if you’re not already backing up your
pictures to an external hard drive or storing an extra copy in some other
physical medium or location, then you’re asking for trouble. One day, your hard
drive may decide to up and die and without a good backup, all your photographic
memories will die right along with it.
This is Larry Schneider, logging off.
