Take Control of Your Digital Photos
Wrangling with countless photos on your hard drive? Follow our tips to organize thechaos.
Digital cameras let you take pictures with impunity. You no longer have to buy film, think in terms of 24-exposure photo sessions, or pay to process any of the crummy shots lurking in your camera. Thatprobably means you've started taking more photos than ever before. You shoot the same scene fromthree different angles, take extra "insurance" photos of special situations, and generally get a lot morecreative than you did with your film camera.That's great, but all this photography has a downside: Your hard drive probably looks like a digital versionof the back of your garage. It's filled with hundreds--perhaps thousands--of photos. Some are titled, butmany others still say stuff like DSC030256.jpg. Some of them live in logically named folders; others arestrewn all over the place, virtually impossible to find.Here are ten tips that will help you thoroughly organize your digital photo collection. So the next timeUncle Ned asks you for a picture from his cat's 2001 birthday party, you'll be able to find it in seconds.
1. Let's See--Was It DSC044653 or DSC044654?
Nothing--and we mean nothing--will help you get organized faster than simply renaming your photos.When you download images from your digital camera to the PC, they usually come with file names thatonly an alien's mother could love. As soon as you move a set of images to the PC, right-click the first file,choose
Rename
, give it a meaningful name, and do the same for the rest. Later, you'll be able to searchfor that file by part of the name.If you have a lot of pictures to rename at once, it can get tedious. You might want to try batch-renaming--a way to give files new names in bulk, instead of one at a time (see Save Time With the Batch Tool,below).Try this once your picture files are renamed for easy searching: If your system runs Windows XP, click
Start, Search
, choose the
Pictures, music, or video
option, and enter the word
cat
in the 'All or part of thefile name' box. Windows will display thumbnail images of every picture on your hard drive that includesthe term
cat
in the title.If you have Windows 2000, Me, or 98, you can't drill down to search images as easily. You'll have to dothings the old-fashioned way. Click
Start, Search, For Files or Folders
(Me) or
Start, Find, Files or Folders
(98). In the field that appears under 'Search for files or folders named' (Me) or 'Named' (98), type
*cat*
(note the asterisks before and after the search term). Of course, your search results could include otherfiles, like your Word and text files, with the word
cat
in the title. If you know the file extension, you couldadd, say,
.jpg
to the search term. If you don't, you can type in all possible graphics file extensions,separated by commas and with the search term in front of each of them, as in
*cat*.jpg, *cat*.bmp,*cat*.gif, *cat*.tif
.But make sure you rename your pictures right away. If you procrastinate, you'll end up with hundreds of images to rename, and it'll never get done.
2. Save Time With the Batch Tool
If you're in a hurry but want to label your photos before you forget, you can rename them all in a singlebatch if your system runs Windows XP. Select the images, right-click, and choose
Rename
. Type a newname for the images and press
Enter
.Windows renames all the selected files, but also attaches a differentnumber at the end of each name to tell them apart. What good is that? If you don't have time to renameevery image, at least you can name them all after the trip you just took (like "Yellowstone") so they'll beeasy to find when you do get around to renaming or editing them.If you have an earlier version of Windows, you can still perform batch operations on photos, but you'llneed a specialized program likeACDSeefrom ACDSystems (free trial, $50 to buy) or Jasc'sImage Robot
(free trial, $90 to buy). Both programs let you make the same changes to a large batch of photos, so you
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