Organising your digital photos

Washington - You have thousands of digital photographs, but where is the one you need? That's the question that virtually everyone with a digital camera faces sooner or later. To be able to answer it, you have to have a system in place for cataloguing and tagging your images. Such a system can turn your growing digital image collection from a disorganised mess into a something that's actually fun to work with. Here's how to get started. --- Folder organisation Before you download a single image onto your hard drive, sketch out a folder system that allows you to find large batches of your images by categories that are most important to you. First of all, keep all of your photographs in a top-level folder called 'photos,' 'images,' or something similar. From that point, how you define your folder structure should be determined in large part by how it's most important for you to categorise images on a large scale. For instance, you may want to create a subfolder for each year in which you took photographs. Under 'photos,' then, you may have folders for '2007,' '2008,' and '2009,' and under each of those 'year' folders, you could create subfolders by day, as in 01-01-2009, for January 1, 2009. This would be strictly a date-centric organisational structure and might be suitable for someone who downloads images virtually every day. Or you may find that naming your subgroupings of photographs after the major event that they chronicle is a more intuitive way of storage. Under 2008, then, you might create a folder called 'Katrin's birthday,' or 'Jonah's wedding.' However you name the subfolders, they should contribute to your ultimate goal of being able to find your photographs quickly. Regardless of the exact names you use for your folders, try not dump photographs from multiple days or events into one folder. You would only be creating more work for yourself later if you adopt such a procedure. --- Organising software Many digital cameras come with some type of image editing package, but few come with an image organiser, which should be an essential of your image cataloguing strategy. You'll want to choose your image organiser carefully because you'll likely spend a good deal of your time in this program, tagging photographs, renaming images, creating groups, and perhaps launching your favourite image editor. In other words, you'll want to settle on software that both meets your needs and is made by a company that's likely to continue to support the product. That's why you should probably look to the top-flight image organisers in each price category. In the freeware arena, there's IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com), FastStone (http://www.faststone.org), and Google's Picasa (http://picasa.google.com). Picasa probably gets the nod over the others because you know that Google is going to be around for a while and continue to improve the application. If you're looking for a free image organizer, however, try them all to see which one suits you best. Targeting a general digital camera audience are reasonably-priced packages such as ACDSee (http://www.acdsee.com), Cerious' Software's Thumbs Plus (http://www.cerious.com), or some of the image browsing and cataloguing components that come as part of image editing packages such as Adobe PhotoShop Elements. The packages in this category are designed to help you tag and later locate a large number of images, but they're not geared toward professionals that might require sophisticated processing features. ACDsee, however, does offer a 'pro' version geared toward professionals. All packages are available in a trial version. On the high end, Adobe's Bridge (http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/bridge) and Lightroom (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom) products are made to catalogue tens of thousands of images. Sophisticated tagging and batch processing features are included. Bridge comes bundled with several of Adobe's image editing and production packages, and Lightroom is available separately. Microsoft's Expression Media 2 (http://www.microsoft.com/expression), formerly iView, is another capable high-end image organizer. ---Image tagging Once you've decided on an image cataloging package, you can begin tagging your images. Tagging is the crucial process whereby you assign categories and keywords to your digital photographs so that you can quickly retrieve them later, regardless of where they are actually stored on your hard drive or network. The tagging process will take time, but it doesn't have to be painful. That's primarily because any decent image cataloging package will allow you to select and tag multiple images at once, and some even have the ability to automatically tag new photographs during the process of downloading them onto your computer. The early effort you devote to tagging will be amply rewarded later when all you have to do to find all the images of your son, daughter, or best friend is to type his or her name into the search field of your image cataloging software, and all of the relevant images appear within seconds. When that happens, you'll know you've achieved order out of what could have been chaos. --- Renaming photographs One sure-fire way to be able to find your photographs - regardless of how you catalogue them - is to ensure that the images files themselves have meaningful names. Giving your images names such as 'mybirthday01.jpg' instead of the default 'x03d7497.jpg' will go a long way toward making your images searchable even without image cataloguing and tagging software. A standard operating search would help you if the names you gave you images were meaningful. Renaming hundreds or even thousands of images at a time is easy with the right tools. ACDSee, FastStone, and other image browsers have a batch renaming tool built right in. Most good batch renaming tools allow you to preview the new names of your photographs before you apply the change. A good free renaming tool is The Rename (http://www.softempire.com/the-rename.html), which can be used to simultaneously rename not only multiple files but multiple folders as well. Having the right image organisation processes in place will not only save you hours of time when you go to find images months later. It will also make your image collection less foreboding and more approachable, which means you'll end up using your images on more occasions than you otherwise would. Get your image library in control, and free yourself up to take more pictures.