This is Part 4 in a series by my “real-life” friend, Danielle Zacharias, of Side by Side Video… {Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.}
Practical Ideas for Going Digital
If you had a chance to read my last few posts, there was a lot of information about why we need to be on top of organizing and keeping good quality digital originals of everything. Now, here are some ideas to help start putting this information to use.
Again, we’ll start with photos. There are many different ways to organize your photos once they are all in your computer. Most computers come with free programs useful for organizing photos. Mac computers come with iPhoto for free and PCs come with Windows Photo Gallery, though I would highly recommend Picasa for the PC. You can download Picasa for free (there’s even a beta version for Mac now!). Many digital cameras also come with their own photo organizing software.
I own a Nikon camera and the software that came with it is much faster and more streamlined than iPhoto, which came with my computer. Now, all of these programs are very basic and have limited editing abilities. This is because their major function is organizing. So what that means is that you will organize photos in one program and edit them in another. If you want to edit your photos you will have to buy more sophisticated editing software like Photoshop. Photoshop is a program that is very difficult to teach yourself so I would recommend having someone show you the ropes or buy a book or take a class on it. Actually, another reason I recommend Picasa is because there are some basic editing tools if you need to crop or fix some colors or convert a photo to black and white.
Okay, now back to the organizing! A word of caution: Make sure that whatever organizing software you use, you understand how it works. Some programs, like my Nikon software, put all your newly uploaded photos into a folder that you can easily rename and when I click on that photo, I’m opening the actual photo. Other programs like iPhoto have a “referenced” version of the photo that you see and the original in a folder not easy to find on your computer. So you’ll want to be careful, if that’s the case, not to move folders around because the software gets “confused” and can’t find the photos. I can help answer more specific questions on that if needed.
Some people even like to organize their photos online so that you can email people the link and share photos. The ONLY website I recommend for this is Flickr because it is simple, loads your full quality photo and people can’t “steal” your photo by clicking and saving it {although your friends & family can download them which is convenient}. Oh, and it’s free. There is a version that costs $25 a year for unlimited space and that is something to consider as a way to back up your files. Using Kodakgallery.com or Snapfish.com are only useful for printing photos but not for archiving them because they reduce the quality a lot and we want to keep high quality photos as originals. This also causes a problem if you are using those sites to send photos to friends to download onto their computers because of the quality reduction. Honestly, if it’s a few photos, email them, and if it’s a lot, just burn them on a CD or DVD– it’s the only way to keep the photos high quality. By the way, “high quality” means 1 megabyte (mb) and higher. If you have photos in the kilobytes (kb) they are too small.
The main thing is to be consistent with labeling. What you will want to do is decide on a system so that you’ll be able to find them again. Will you name all your folders the name of the event? Easter, Christmas, Sue’s wedding, etc… Or will you name them by date? 2008-11-27, November 08, etc…We usually name by date, then event so that they stay in chronological order so “2008-12-16daniellebirthday” would be an example. So whatever you choose, just remember to be consistent so that when you are looking for a photo or batch of photos, they will be easy to find.
Next week we’ll continue with photos and ideas for printing. I’ll also give you my top picks for scanners, cameras, software and websites for all of your photo organizing needs!
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