If you’ve been promising yourself to get a handle on that ever-growing collection of digital images, now’s as good a time as any to start. You can just add it to the list of New Year’s resolutions you’ve already made.
Digital cameras make it entirely too easy to amass huge collections of images – good as well as bad. Camera utilities, the computer operating system itself, and photo editing programs all offer (or impose?) their own way of downloading images to the computer. Each uses a different system to label the folders and probably puts them in different locations on your hard drive too. They generally don’t talk to each other either, so one won’t automatically know where the other put the photos. After several months, finding a specific image can turn into a nightmare.
The best way to avoid this is to use one set of tools and stick with it. This allows you to develop one consistent way to download images that becomes so familiar and predictable that you don’t have to give it a second thought.
Camera makers most often include a software bundle with a new camera. Typically, this includes a downloading utility, cataloguing software and an image editor. If these aren’t to your liking (often they are quite basic and you may soon outgrow them), you can go with a popular and inexpensive image editor like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Corel Paint Shop Pro, which have the same three bits – image editor, catalogue and download utility. Products sold primarily as image cataloguers, such as ACDSee now also include image adjustment tools, so that’s another route to take.
The download utility and catalogue software often work together, the downloader taking care of the physical process of moving files from camera to computer, with the catalogue creating an electronic filing system for your images. Some catalogues also allow you to batch process a number of images, which is a great time saver. Some batch utilities are batch resizing, which allows you to take a bunch of images from your six megapixel camera and scale them down to an email-friendly size; and batch renaming, which allows you to give a set of images a common root name, such as “Greece vacation.”
While you may want to for your own reasons, it is not necessary to rename the actual file because catalogues also come with powerful organizing tools that allow you write descriptions or attach keywords, rankings or colour codes to each image in the collection and then find them that way. Hence, if you wrote “Greece vacation” in a description field, you’d be able to quickly find the image by performing a search, even though the actual file name might be something like DSC0043.
You may eventually encounter a situation where you have so many images in the same category that finding a specific one becomes a challenge. This is where rankings, colour codes and other qualitative information can come in handy. You can further refine your collection by ranking the images – giving it a number usually between one and five, a star rating or a colour code, for example. Once you have this second piece of information, you can combine them to conduct Boolean searches to find only the “Greece vacation” images that have five stars, for example.
Digital cameras make it entirely too easy to amass huge collections of images – good as well as bad. Camera utilities, the computer operating system itself, and photo editing programs all offer (or impose?) their own way of downloading images to the computer. Each uses a different system to label the folders and probably puts them in different locations on your hard drive too. They generally don’t talk to each other either, so one won’t automatically know where the other put the photos. After several months, finding a specific image can turn into a nightmare.
The best way to avoid this is to use one set of tools and stick with it. This allows you to develop one consistent way to download images that becomes so familiar and predictable that you don’t have to give it a second thought.
Camera makers most often include a software bundle with a new camera. Typically, this includes a downloading utility, cataloguing software and an image editor. If these aren’t to your liking (often they are quite basic and you may soon outgrow them), you can go with a popular and inexpensive image editor like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Corel Paint Shop Pro, which have the same three bits – image editor, catalogue and download utility. Products sold primarily as image cataloguers, such as ACDSee now also include image adjustment tools, so that’s another route to take.
The download utility and catalogue software often work together, the downloader taking care of the physical process of moving files from camera to computer, with the catalogue creating an electronic filing system for your images. Some catalogues also allow you to batch process a number of images, which is a great time saver. Some batch utilities are batch resizing, which allows you to take a bunch of images from your six megapixel camera and scale them down to an email-friendly size; and batch renaming, which allows you to give a set of images a common root name, such as “Greece vacation.”
While you may want to for your own reasons, it is not necessary to rename the actual file because catalogues also come with powerful organizing tools that allow you write descriptions or attach keywords, rankings or colour codes to each image in the collection and then find them that way. Hence, if you wrote “Greece vacation” in a description field, you’d be able to quickly find the image by performing a search, even though the actual file name might be something like DSC0043.
You may eventually encounter a situation where you have so many images in the same category that finding a specific one becomes a challenge. This is where rankings, colour codes and other qualitative information can come in handy. You can further refine your collection by ranking the images – giving it a number usually between one and five, a star rating or a colour code, for example. Once you have this second piece of information, you can combine them to conduct Boolean searches to find only the “Greece vacation” images that have five stars, for example.
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