Getting Control of Your Digital Photos

Hey, after a plague of personal health distractions, it's great to be back among the living. It's left me lots of time to think about what comes next, and it's going to be a fairly significant project: Getting Control of Your Digital Photos.

Featured Software:
  Microsoft Photo Info, Piky Basket, Duplicate Cleaner

I'm calling this a 'project' because there are different aspects to this problem that require different pieces of software. I started with the assumption that all most people really need to organize, edit, and share their photos is a single program like Picasa, which is a very powerful program, indeed. However, I have come to think that there are some steps to take on the organization front before bringing in Picasa, if you have been taking digital photos for a while as my family has, and you have a collection that is spread all over your computer. Picasa has some tools for this, but they simply aren't suitable for a large-scale re-organization.

The first step is to track down all your photo files and get them into one place. Also, you may have duplicates of photos that you created in order to make a special collection for Grandma, and another of your Hawaiian vacation. You may have photos that you extracted from emails stored in odd places. You may have collections of pictures that you don't even want to keep. Some of the image files might not be photos at all, but images that supplement some of your programs and documentation.

I'm going to show you, in the first screencast of a series, about how to use two programs to do this kind of rough clean-up of your collection:

  • Windows Explorer, with the help of two free plug-ins, will be used to find your photos, separate them from other image files, delete those that have no value to you, and get the rest of them into one place. With a free plug-in from Microsoft, Windows Explorer can also be used to fix up the dates that are stored inside your image files, and tag them with information that can later be used to find them. (Picasa will like that, and you will, too.) Another free Windows Explorer plug-in lets you browse the list of files, putting selected photos into a 'basket,' and then dumping the contents of the basket into a directory.
  • Duplicate Cleaner finds duplicates in your collection and allows you to delete them, or move them into another folder. This program is powerful, fast, and free.
When you've achieved some semblance of order, hopefully aided by watching this screencast, we'll move on to creating albums and collections with Picasa. Then we can do some sprucing up of the photos (e.g., getting rid of the red-eye, and cropping out your mother-in-law) with Picasa's photo editing functions. Finally, we'll address all the ways you can use Picasa to share your albums with family and friends.