Holiday time brings with it memories and situations that many of us like to capture on film.... (errr, make that SD card, xD card, MMC, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, etc.)
I came back from our recent camping holiday with around 400 snaps. Not surprisingly, even my closest friends don't want to sit through that many!
When I first got my digital camera, I tried all sorts of ways of organising the files on my PC, such as storing photos in folders based on their topic, and using subfolders for different ratings (the "crud" folder was always pretty full....). I also renamed photos so they no longer had cryptic names like "DSC0198.JPG". I soon got tired of coming up with new ways of naming folders and photos. There had to be a better way...
And there is. Enter a whole new breed of software dedicated to the task of cataloging photos. There seems to be hundreds of packages available offering this ability. Indeed, your digital camera might have come with a bundled package that can help. A good list of photo cataloguing software, with links to reviews, can be found here. Professional photographers can also choose from a some very powerful tools (and a new one that's looking rather promising is Adobe/Macromedia's Lightroom).
What do I recommend? Well, if you like arranging photos into folders, but want a bit more flexibility to assign keywords and captions, then you'll find Google's Picasa easy enough to pick up and use. And it's free. But my choice for both private and business use is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0. This latest version really is a powerful way to organise your collection, enhance your snaps, and produce a variety of creations. You create tags (keywords) and assign them to photos via drag and drop. You can also create collections; a group of photos (eg. "Our 2006 Holiday") that you can work on collectively. It can still be a bit of a chore to tag your photos but Elements takes a lot of the pain away and has some innovative features such as the ability to find all photos that contain faces, and it can automatically remove red eyes during import of photos from your camera. I particularly like the way it stores your touched-up photos in version sets, so you never lose the original and can keep a history of changes.
So what's wrong with it then? Well, it can take a long time to start up, but once it's running it's fast. And something that really annoys me (though to be fair, this isn't just confined to Elements) is that it only supports affiliated online photo hosting sites. This means for example, in Elements you can send photos directly to a Kodak site, but you can't send them directly to Flickr. Sure, you can export them to files and upload them via the Flickr uploader, but that's a pain and you lose all your tag and category information.
Hmm... maybe we'll have to get Clyx Studios to do something about that....
What other features would you like to see in cataloging software?
Tags: adobe, photo album, photo album software, photo cataloging software, photoshop, photoshop elements, picasa, software