Software for Digital Photography

So... you have digital photos on your computer. But what do you do with them now?

If you hope to ever find them again they will need to be organized. And if you want to use them for anything you will need some kind of software to manipulate them: correct the exposure, crop, resize, etc. There are any number of different ways that you could organize your digital photos, and many different software applications that can be used for photo manipulation.

The most common image manipulation software in use today, for example, is Adobe Photoshop, costing hundreds of dollars to use. But while Photoshop is the commonly accepted industry standard, most photographers don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on a piece of software. There are freely available programs that are very close to as powerful as Photoshop and that do everything that most people might need to do.

So here I will introduce two different free software applications that I use to organize and edit my digital photos.

Organize Your Digital Photos with Picasa

Anyone who has taken any significant number of digital photos has faced the question, how can all these pictures be stored on the computer and organized so that they can possibly be found for use in the future?

With today’s enormous hard drive capacities there is the potential to store hundreds of thousands of digital photos for many years.

The simple capacity and ability to store digital photos is not enough, however, because unless you have a plan for organizing your digital photo album, chances are it will quickly get out of hand, and then... well, good luck finding that photo you’re looking for then.

1. Organize your Photos by Date
   One valuable aid in digital photo organization is to always organize your photos by date.
   
   Anytime after I am out taking pictures, when I go to store them on the computer I put them in a folder named with that day's date (e.g., "09-02-10"), then I store that folder in a folder named "2010", for this year. So that my folder structure is as follows:
   
   2010
       09-02-10
           image1.jpg
           image2.jpg
           image3.jpg
   
   This step alone is a great help when it comes to maintaining a degree of sanity in digital photo organization.
   
   
2. Add Keywords to your Photographs
   Another step which can be useful for certain kinds of photos is to gave them a few descriptive keywords that could help you find a given photo in the future.
   
   Picasa makes this step incredibly easy.
   
   To add a keyword to a picture in Picasa, go to a picture and go to View > Keywords, or just use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + k.
   
   In the image here, you can see I added 4th of July, and fireworks. When you are done, click OK.
   
   The big payoff of taking the time to add all those keywords comes when you need to find one.
   
   
   As you can see here, with a simple search for “fireworks”, Picasa instantly pulls-up the image to which I added those simple keywords.
   
   While it may seem tedious to add keywords for your images, it might be a good idea, at least for your most important ones.
   
   Although this is a step in which I consistently fall short, it can prove to be a huge time saver. Those few moments spent on each picture could save you hours of searching in the future.
   
   
3. Organize
   As soon as Picasa is opened, it begins scouring your hard drive for pictures. It can be set to look on the entire hard drive, or only in certain folders. You can choose to browse your pictures organized just like your folder structure, or you can let Picasa organize the view by the date the photo was taken.
   
   To help you organize further, Picasa also allows you to create virtual albums, adding pictures and supplying a title. This allows you to group certain pictures, but also avoids creating multiple copies which can unnecessarily consume your disk space.
   
   
4. Enhance
   Picasa has an extremely easy to use, yet surprisingly powerful set of image enhancement tools allowing you to correct, edit and enhance your photo quickly and very easily.
   
   
5. Share
   Picasa includes a number of built-in options for sharing your pictures.
   • With a single click you can put an album online with Picasa Web Albums.
   • You can easily export photos optimized to send via email.
   • You can view an album as a beautiful slideshow.
   • You can create a gift CD to give to family and friends.
     
   
   
6. Print
   And finally, Picasa integrates with a number of online photo printers allowing you to easily purchase prints of any of your photos.
   
   
Picasa is a great help in organizing digital photos and performing basic enhancements. I encourage you to download it and give it a whirl!

Picasa in available for download through the free Google pack.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)

...to be Continued.


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