Since acquiring my first digital camera three years ago, and a further two digital cameras since then (not counting the one in my cell phone), I have taken close to 6000 pictures. Since I no longer have to worry about film processing costs for “dud” pictures, I have become very experimental and snap-happy. My color multifunction inkjet printer cost around $200, and it prints absolutely amazing color photos. I now have at my disposal all the equipment necessary to take unlimited photos, without paying any penalty for over-exposed, out-of-focus, or just boring photos, and I can print the photos I want to keep, right in the comfort of my own home.
Ironically, I still don’t have any picture albums or framed photos in my house – all my pictures, duds included, are all stored on my home computer, my laptop, or my Nurturing Loving Partner’s computer. Additionally, probably two thirds of all the pictures that I have religiously moved to my computers are worthless to me in terms of sentimental or artistic value. This week I decided to take control of this situation and start weeding out all the bad and uninteresting photos from my collections, and make prints of the photos that I really like so I can start making scrap-books. This laborious exercise has taught me a few things for the future, and so I am passing along what I have learned for the benefit of those just embarking on their digital photography adventures.
The first thing I have learned is that it would have been much easier to organize my photos if I deleted the bad ones right away, before moving them to the computer. Deleting 4000 photos out of 6000 (two thirds of all my photos) is a lot of work and very time-consuming! The bad photos take up a lot of hard-drive space, and as they are deleted one by one, my hard-disk becomes more and more fragmented. Lesson? Delete bad photos the same day you take them. Delete them right off the camera if you know the photo you have just taken is no good. It will save you a lot of time when you start your scrap-booking project.
The second thing I learned is to get a card-reader for your computer. A card reader offers many advantages over connecting your camera to your computer, namely, you don’t deplete the batteries on your camera as you transfer photos, you don’t need to load any additional software, you can view and delete before transferring, and you can readily grab the great photos from your friend’s camera which has a different card type. Card readers are a must-have accessory, and cost about $35.
Weeding through 6000 photos is difficult enough, but without good organizing software, it is more like a nightmare. Using standard Windows folders to view and sort is so cumbersome, you might just give up on the whole project and your photos will be imprisoned in your computer forever. Google’s free Picasa software is a great solution to this problem, and it makes organizing fun and easy. It also offers an easy to use red-eye tool for on-the-fly editing. For more difficult editing tasks, you might think you need to spend several hundred dollars on Photoshop – but you don’t. PhotoPlus 6 by Serif Software is free, it will work for practically all your advanced editing needs, and it’s easier to use.
Now - go take some pictures - lots of pictures!
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