Getting Control of Your Digital Photos

This Guide is a little different. You need it if:

• you load photos from your digital camera to your computer
• your photos are out of control -- e.g., spread all over your hard drive with little or no organization
• you aren't happy with this state of affairs

This was my situation when I wanted to start using Picasa. At first, I thought I would use Picasa to organize my photos, but I found some problems. For example, many of my photos didn't have valid 'taken on' dates, so Picasa's chronological ordering wasn't close; the filenames weren't descriptive, so I couldn't tell what I had without looking at each individual file; because my photos lacked organization, I had made lots of copies of photos into different collections organized for this or that purpose; and, many of my photos were extracted to random places from emails sent by my friends and family.

Theoretically, you can handle many of these problems in Picasa, but you're definitely better off if you establish some basic order first, like grouping your pictures into the year they were taken, in one general location on your disk, and eliminating the duplicates. Even before that, if you can add some information into the files that reflects, for example, that these are pictures of Beth or Gina's grandchildren, so much the better.

I looked long and hard for a single program that would help me solve these problems, but I couldn't find such a thing. I did find some good utilities that together can be incorporated into a process of getting your photos under control.

So, this Guide is different: Rather than introduce you to a cool application, it addresses a problem with three different tools. I debated with my wife about breaking this into three separate Guides, but at great peril I went over her head, because I wanted to offer a single Guide that integrates these three tools into a solution, prior to jumping into Picasa, which IS a cool application.

Hopefully, this resonates with some of you, and it isn't too geeky. Note that a couple of these tools can be used for file organization in general -- not just for organizing your photos.