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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
 
can go off and do something else while your PC toils without you. Other image editors also offer thisfeature, such as the full version of Adobe Photoshop($609).
3. Rotate the Easy Way
Even simple stuff like rotating pictures sideways can be a pain if you have a lot of photos. Windows XPmakes it a snap to rotate many pictures at once through a technique called batch processing. Here's how:In Windows XP, open a folder that includes some digital images and select several of them. (To selectphotos that aren't adjacent to each other, click each photo while holding down the
Ctrl 
key.) Now right-click the selected images, and you should see the option to rotate them clockwise or counterclockwise.Choose one, and Windows will do the rest.Windows 2000, Me, and 98 don't offer the batch-rotation trick, but you can rotate your photos in animage-editing program, such as Jasc'sPaint Shop Pro($109) orAdobe Photoshop Elements(free trial, $99 to buy). In Paint Shop Pro, click
Image, Rotate
; in Photoshop Elements, select
Image, Rotate Canvas
,then choose
90° CW 
or
90° CCW 
.
4. Be Ruthless: Delete the Trash
When it comes to digital photos, we all become terrible packrats, saving pictures of people without headsand images that contain ghostlike blurs that we suspect might be someone's toddler from back in theRonald Reagan era. If you want your digital photo collection to be useful, though, you need to mercilesslydiscard the terrible shots--all those that appear out of focus and just poorly composed.If you have half a dozen photos of your cousin's new home, pick the best two and throw away the rest. If you're honest with yourself, you'll agree that your photo collection is more useful, easier to search, andless intimidating to maintain if it's pared down to a reasonable size.
5. Organize Your Life with Folders
Windows gives you a great place to store your pictures--a folder that's actually called My Pictures.However, packing thousands of images into one big folder is a lot like storing several years' worth of taxreceipts in a single size-11 shoebox.There's an easier way: Open
My Pictures
and right-click anywhere on the folder background. Choose
New,Folder 
and give it a name appropriate for your current batch of photos. Make as many folders as you need(you can make folders within a folder) and drag your photos (and folders) around into logical places. If you file your photos by criteria like year, event, subject, and topic, they'll be extremely easy to findanytime you need them.
6. Slim Down Your Photos
Do your photos need to go on a diet? It depends on how you plan to use them. If all you ever plan to do isattach your pictures to e-mail messages or paste them into digital documents and online photo albums,you're wasting a lot of hard drive space by keeping images in their 3-megapixel glory. Reclaim gigabytesof storage space by resaving them as 640-by-480-pixel photos. You can do that by hand in an imageeditor like Jasc's Paint Shop Pro (choose
Image, Resize
, then enter the pixel size you want in the Resizedialog box), or automate the process with a program like Jasc's Image Robot, which can batch-converthundreds of images into a different size and file format while you go watch TV.Just remember: Don't throw away your high-resolution original images if you think you may need themfor a different purpose some day. If you might want to print particular photos at 5 by 7 inches or bigger,for instance, keep the high-resolution versions around--you'll need them.For additional tips on how to make your images e-mail-ready, see "Top Photo-Editing Tips."
7. Danger! Don't Hurt the Originals
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