How do you sort out your photos?

sevlow

Guys - Are you sure Picasa is the right vehicle for this guy. He says he has a couple of thousand images to manage and this is going to grow over time.

I've revisited Picasa today to check on current functionality and I can see it's a nice piece of work for managing a small file base that you may want to share online.

But the whole process of uploading, the clunky use of tags and keywording and the overhead of managing two file structures(one in Picasa and one on your PC) is going to drive him nuts.

superscaper

sevlow wrote: »

But the whole process of uploading, the clunky use of tags and keywording and the overhead of managing two file structures(one in Picasa and one on your PC) is going to drive him nuts.

I must be missing something. Where has the OP requested it must be online as well and why do you seem to think you HAVE to put your photos online with picasa?

I use picasa to sort and view photos stored on my computer, nothing more. My photos aren't online.

sevlow

Supercraper - It's me that missed something. I had only come across Picassa web albums and was not aware they had software that would run locally. My mistake and apologies to the OP.

I have just downloaded their application si I can have a play in a bit. I'll se how it compares to what I use currently.

superscaper

sevlow wrote: »

Supercraper - It's me that missed something. I had only come across Picassa web albums and was not aware they had software that would run locally. My mistake and apologies to the OP.

I have just downloaded their application si I can have a play in a bit. I'll se how it compares to what I use currently.

No worries, thought it must have been something like that, as you were talking about it as if were like photobucket, flickr etc. Good luck with the software, I've found it to be the best so far for organising my locally stored photos.

Dead_Eye_Jones

Picasa is great, my choice too.

I have digital photos going back to the 90's!

I upload my photos into themed folders Family, Holidays, Work, or whatever and then into subfolders for each batch taken. Picasa will then automatically arrange your pics in different ways using tagged info or the file structure etc. So I chose to go Year -> Event. With events ordered by time grouped by year.

Prob worth getting used to tagging photos with as much meta data as poss, thankfully new digital cameras add in various bits of info already - some even do geo tagging!

Sooner or later Microsoft will be ditching traditional file sytems for their database driven technology (was planned but dropped for Vista) which will mean tagged info will be fantastic for arranging you files into any structure you like. Instantly flip between time, event or location - or anything else you care to tag. Folders will seem so old hat!

Good stuff .

sevlow

Have to agree it's Picassa lookspretty neat. It has some shortcomings for my own use - but hell its free which gives the OP the chance to try it out and see it fits his needs.

I'm not going to bang on here about why it would'nt work for me because thats not the point. However you may be intersted in looking at an Adobe Lightroom video tutorial which can be found on the page below below. Just look for Lightromm 1.1 section and click on the podcast button which will open the video in quicktime.

http://www.creativesuitepodcast.com/

pww2004

Another vote for Picasa.

Have tried a number of others and all our family prefer Picasa. As well as great sorting facilities the printing and email options are good as well. Particularly like the ability to select a group of photos and use Picasa to email them (via OutlookExpress if you prefer) with Picasa reducing the size on the fly for you

Pete

Iconic

Wow.

Many thanks for all your replies. Until I read them I thought Picasa was a Spanish painter!

Just downloading it now!

Lakeuk

Add another vote for Picasa, so easy to use plus you can geotag your photos.

As for managing folders when I import photo sets I name the folder as follows:-

yyyymmdd_location

makes it easier to find photos on my harddisk

also recommend GPicSync if you need to geotag lots of photos with ease
http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/

Marty999

Dead_Eye_Jones wrote: »

Prob worth getting used to tagging photos with as much meta data as poss, thankfully new digital cameras add in various bits of info already - some even do geo tagging!

I have never heard of geo tagging until now, is it really that useful?