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Digital
- Organizing Your Digital Photos
Author:
Jennifer Newton
Ok,
you have your camera. You have taken your photos.
Now you have thousands of images and don't have any
idea where you saved the photos from your son's birthday
party last year. There are many free tools to help
your organize your digital photos as well as ways
to use the basics on your computer to help you keep
your images organized.
File
Folder Basics
If you are anything like me, time is precious. For
the first year that I owned my digital camera, I would
load the images off of the camera into the My Pictures
folder on my computer and then go back to taking photos.
This is how my nightmare began. It was when I decided
to resolve this problem that I came up with this basic
method for organizing my photos.
- Right-click
on the START button and click on Explore.
- In
Windows Explorer, go to your C drive
- Go
to My Documents, then go to My Pictures
- Click
on FILE , then NEW and then FOLDER
- Type
the name of your folder (i.e. Jen's Digital Photos)
- Create
a new folder within this folder (File | New
| Folder) and name it the date a group of
photos was taken.
- Continue
this process and save your images into the appropriate
folder.
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It's
Free, Why Not?
There are many free image organizational tools
available all over the internet. Why not use
them right? Yes, it may take a little time initially
to start filtering through your images to add
them to the application, but in the long run,
it will save you so much time in the future.
Kodak
offers a free software call EasyShare that once
installed has a plethora of fantastic tools,
one including organization. If you follow the
directions above and save your images to specific
folders on your hard drive, this is the perfect
second step in your organization plan.
EasyShare
allows you to categorize your images by topic,
date, file name and so much more. You can easily
add and remove images to the system and the
fact that it gives you a visual reference makes
it invaluable. How many times have you gone
through file folders looking at file names trying
to figure out what it is?
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Burn
Baby Burn
As much as we would like to believe once we have saved
an image to our hard drive, "that's it, you're done"
it just isn't the case. I personally have experienced
a hard drive crash. It is NOT fun! And rather heart
breaking when you loose precious photos! Burn your
images to a CD! If you do not have a CD burner on
your computer, GET ONE!
Each
CD burner comes with it's own software to run the
burning process. But they all have the same basic
features. You can burn files and music. Here are a
few tips on burning images to CD.
- If
you followed the first steps in organizing your
photos on you hard drive, burning them to a CD will
be a breeze. Simply select the entire folder (i.e
Jen's Digital Photos) and burn away!
- You
are burning FILES. This often confuses people when
they start the burning software.
- Avery
offers many free templates to go with their labels
so take the next step now and label your CDs so
you know what's on them!
- You
can even make CD's for family and friends that can
be viewed on a TV with a DVD player with DVD
Picture Show.
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