Organize Pictures

Is it a good idea to rename your image files?

vlad — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:34:04 +0000

When reading professional photographers blogs and websites I keep coming across this question: is it a good idea to rename your digital pictures files or leave them with the original file name assigned by the camera automatically? The question seems to be a subtle one and the apparent reason for the debate is not immediately obvious. In this article I will be focusing on clearing the issues and identifying the terms.

How to select your best pictures

vlad — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:07:27 +0000

Selecting the best pictures from a set of digital pictures is one of the most common tasks for a digital photographer. This used to be the case even during the film era. Sometimes you would just print one copy of each picture in a roll of film and then you would physically select the best pictures to put in your photo album. The rest would end up in some envelope in a shoebox that would start collecting dust. Well, this happens in the digital world as well, except for...the dust. But how do you select your best pictures efficiently in a digital world?

My pictures counter for June 2010

vlad — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:17:00 +0000

How many digital pictures do you have? Have you ever counted them? It's easy! At the end of October 2009 I decided to keep track of how many digital pictures and videos I have on my hard drive. So, I hope to be able to provide an update at the end of each month and show you how many pictures & videos I have, how much space they take and how much space I have left on my main hard drive.

Finally I got the camera I was dreaming about

vlad — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:58:07 +0000

What was my dream camera? It was a Canon T2i or what's called in Europe Canon EOS 550D. Last week, after about one year of waiting to save the money, my dream has become a reality and I am the proud owner of this brand new Canon T2i digital camera. How is this camera? Is it really as good as it's hyped up to be? Find out what I like and what I don't like about this camera.

My pictures counter for May 2010

vlad — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:51:45 +0000

A novel approach to organizing your pictures?

vlad — Mon, 17 May 2010 20:11:36 +0000

As you know, I keep looking for simple solutions for organizing my digital pictures. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Andrea D'Intino about his company's product called Tabbles. Tabbles provides an innovative approach to organizing all the files on your computer, not only your pictures. I'm hoping to be able to provide a full review of this product, but for now you can read my interview with Andrea where he describes his own company's product.

My pictures counter for April 2010

vlad — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:25:54 +0000

Efficient keywording techniques or how to create a controlled vocabulary

vlad — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 01:00:30 +0000

If you have been using image keywords or tags for a while, the topic of managing your keywords is very relevant. If you're new however, to image keywords, then this topic might not seem necessary, at least not now. However, after applying keywords to your images without any strategy, you will end up having a pile of keywords that you can't sort out. Just like folders can become unusable if not named and organized correctly, keywords too can become unusable if not maintained properly. In order to avoid this problem you need to create efficient keywords, or in other words, you need a controlled vocabulary. But how do you create a controlled vocabulary?

How to organize video clips

vlad — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:00:40 +0000

Even though I take a ton of pictures I also shoot quite a few video clips as well. Having small children makes taking video clips a lot of fun since they like to look at video clips as well. Learning better ways to organize my video clips is one of my goals for this year. Over the years I created a very efficient method for organizing my pictures, but when it comes to my video clips, I pretty much place them in the same folders where my pictures are. This is the simplest way, but it might not be best way to organize my video clips. In this article I'm exploring different options for organizing your video clips. I'm not sure what is the best method but here are some options I found to work pretty well.

My pictures counter for March 2010

vlad — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:00:11 +0000

How to organize your old scanned pictures

vlad — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:58:09 +0000

Old pictures are fun because they bring back lots of memories. It's funny how we mostly remember the good things about most memories. Memories are the primary driver for me when I go back into my childhood pictures and decide to scan some and make them digital. I have hundreds of pictures from when I was a child. Even though I would like to scan all of them, I usually pick a few to scan and then forget about it for a while. Organizing old scanned pictures is the same as organizing current picture, at least for me. I get many questions however about organizing scanned pictures, and so i'll describe here how I organize them.

You may be a professional photographer whether you like it or not.

vlad — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:38:13 +0000

Digital photography has turned every mom and dad into a professional photographer. Well, not exactly professional as in having to live from our pictures, but a professional photographer because we all have to deal with a ton of pictures. You see, professional photographers, you know those people who have the coolest jobs and travel around the world for free, they live because of the pictures they take. They have been forced by their profession to organize and protect their pictures. They have to! Otherwise, they can't find and refine their products and if they can't do that...well they're done as far as being professional photographers.

My pictures counter for February 2010

vlad — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:30:06 +0000

How to choose the perfect digital photography software

vlad — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 01:47:46 +0000

Have you ever thought that you just found the perfect digital photography software? You got excited and said that you have finally found what you were looking for. Of course you did...I did...many times! After a while however, I noticed that the reason for my changing the digital photography software was different. Read on to find out.

Understand all digital photography software programs.

vlad — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 01:54:27 +0000

There are many digital photography software programs today that help you organize your digital pictures. Some are called image viewers while others are called digital asset management programs. They can be free of charge or can cost hundreds of dollars to buy. How can one make sense of all these options? It is actually pretty simple because there are essentially three categories of image management programs. Read on to find out what they are.

Two more ways to learn how to organize your pictures

vlad — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:39:58 +0000

I was planning to write a book for a long time but it was not easy to put everything together and edit the content so that it is clear and easy to follow. Well, after many weeks of work, I was able to put it together in a beautiful PDF document that has bookmarks for easy navigation. Now, you're the judge if it's clear and easy to follow.

My pictures counter for January 2010

vlad — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:15:53 +0000

Tutorial 1 – Understand the issues

vlad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:05:16 +0000

Why is organizing digital pictures so challenging and confusing ? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the way I'm organizing my pictures? Well, these might be some of the questions you may be asking yourself. This page is a shortcut to an important series of articles I have written. This series deals with explaining the fundamental issues that all digital photographers face when they try to organize their pictures. Well, read these articles to find out...and let me know what you think.

Tutorial 2 – Create the most efficient folder structure

vlad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:59:39 +0000

Digital pictures organization should always start with creating an efficient folder structure. This way you start to clean up your computer and prepare the way for creating a backup plan for your pictures as well. Only after naming your folders properly you will see how easy it is to add new pictures to your computer without being overwhelmed.

Tutorial 3 – How to find your pictures

vlad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:45:30 +0000

One of the most important reason to learn how to organize your digital pictures is to help yourself find the pictures you want quickly. Without a clear strategy to organize your pictures you can have very little success locating the pictures you want. However, once you have created an efficient folder structure for your pictures, you can simply use the Windows XP search utility to find what you're looking for.

Tutorial 4 – Understand and manage image metadata

vlad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:35:24 +0000

Image tags can be very powerful and they can help you add more precision to your organization structure. But how are iamge tags created and how are they being used by photo management software. It is crucial that you grasp these concepts before starting to use image keywords. This is a short but eye opening tutorial.

Tutorial 5 – Harness the power of keywords

vlad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:30:41 +0000

Image tags are indeed powerful if used the right way. If used the wrong way, tags will become just a pile of useless words. Therefore, it is important to learn how to harness the power of keywords. This tutorial contains the articles to help you do just that.

Tutorial 6 – Insert geotags in your pictures

vlad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:05:43 +0000

Digital photography can use many other technologies to add more information to your pictures. One of these technologies is to use GPS information. GPS information is used everywhere, from map making to Mapquest and Google Maps. It has become fairly easy to insert GPS information into your digital pictures. Why would you do that? Well, so that your picture show up on a map. That's cool!

Tutorial 7 – Create an efficient photography workflow

vlad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:59:56 +0000

A photography workflow is the made of a sequence of steps that you make to get your pictures from your camera to the intended format. Whether it's e-mail, the web or print, you go through a certain set of steps to create that format from your original pictures. This sequence of steps can be complicated or simple, it can be efficient or inefficient depending on many factors. If you would like to learn about creating an efficient photography workflow, read this tutorial.

Tutorial 8 – Backup your pictures

vlad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:45:19 +0000

I keep running into people who tell me about loving to take pictures of their family. It's great, we all love our digital cameras. We can take lots of pictures of our loved ones. But most of those people who love to take pictures never think what might happen when all those pictures they have taken disapper? What happens when your computer crashes and all your pictures are gone? Do you have a plan? You should! Read this tutorial to find out how to set up a simple but efficient backup plan for your digital pictures.

Tutorial 9 – Share your pictures online

vlad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:30:17 +0000

Another great thing about digital photography is that once you shot a picture, you can produce many formats from the same picture. This makes it very easy to share your pictures online. There are a lot of options available and it's hard to know what they all mean. This tutorial covers basic concepts and terms and gives you a clear picture of what it means to publish pictures online.

Tutorial 10 – How to make your images popular on the Internet

vlad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:15:26 +0000

Search engine optimization has to do with making your website content popular on the Internet. This means pretty much that you have lots of visitors coming to your site. Most often your website traffic has to do with ranking well in search engine results. So, what can you do to optimize your photography website for search engines? Or in other words, how to do you make your pictures popular on the Internet?

100 articles in three years for OrganizePictures.com

vlad — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:48:03 +0000

Today is an important day for OrganizePictures.com. I am writing article number 100. For those of you who know about blogging, you know that 100 articles is an important milestone. I have been writing for OrganizePictures.com for over three years now which means I have been able to write close to three articles per month.

Transform pictures in XnView

vlad — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 03:53:03 +0000

Digital photography gives us extreme flexibility. We can take the picture once and then use it for many different purposes. Pictures can easily be cropped, re sized and saved in different formats. There are many ways to transform your pictures but XnView makes transforming your pictures very easy.

XnView Review

vlad — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 02:11:51 +0000

XnView is second on my list of free image viewers, after FastStone Image Viewer. I have been playing recently with Adobe Lightroom 3.0 Beta version and wanted to test compatiblity with XnView when it comes to image keywords. So, I downloaded XnView again and installed it to my computer in order to see what is new. To my surprise I noticed right away that XnView has improved its ablity to handle image metadata. Not only that XnView was compatible with Adobe Lightroom 3.0, but it gave me great insight into how the XMP framework looks like.

My pictures counter for December 2009

vlad — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 08:04:26 +0000

Two new year resolutions you have to keep

vlad — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:25:41 +0000

Almost everyone that owns a digital camera takes pictures on Christmas and New Year holidays...ok...lots of pictures. This is also the time when we make new year resolutions. Have you every made any resolutions about your pictures? I believe that there are two new year resolutions that anyone taking pictures should not only make but also make sure they keep.

Backup your pictures safely using Western Digital My Book Mirror edition

vlad — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:46:55 +0000

Are you backing up your digital pictures? Well, you should...trust me...you have to set up a plan to backup your pictures. Now that I have you convinced to backup your digital pictures, where do you backup your pictures? The simplest and cheapest way is to have an external hard drive. These are cheap, but they can also fail. I personally like an external drive that actually has two drives and automatically creates two copies of the same data. This way if one drive fails, you have another copy.

Image metadata in Ligthtroom and Picasa is compatible.

vlad — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:45:00 +0000

Is Picasa image metadata compatible with Lightroom? The short answer is yes...but. However, this short answer has to be gualified. They are compatible because of Lightroom and not because of Picasa. Or in other words Lightroom is backward compatible. Read on to see the specifics.

Adobe Lightroom version 3.0 BETA

vlad — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:50:11 +0000

Adobe Lightroom v 3.0 Beta has been released for sometime now. You can download it too and play with it. You can even send your feedback to Adobe. I believe the software will work until April of 2010 when they are planning to release the commercial version. See link at the bottom of this article to download Adobe Lightroom 3.0 Beta.

My pictures counter for November 2009

vlad — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:03:35 +0000

How to start organizing your digital pictures

vlad — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:00:58 +0000

When learning something new the first steps are always the hardest and the most important. In order to accomplish something, you have to start somewhere. This is also the case when it comes to learning how to organize your pictures. I can talk a lot about efficient folder structures, image metadata, IPTC, XMP and other things like this. But many times I people simply ask me: how do I start organizing my pictures? I think that's a great question.

What is the future of your image tags?

vlad — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:00:19 +0000

Last week I published the first part of the interview I conducted with Hans Fremuth from Metability Software about image metadata. In this section Hans talked about the current state of the image metadata standard development and in particular about the XMP standard developed by Adobe. In addition, Hans provides insight into how he organizes his own pictures on his computer. This article is the second part of the interview.

The best history lesson on image metadata standards

vlad — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:00:24 +0000

I had the privilege to chat over e-mail with Hans Fremuth from Metability Software about image metadata. He was very gracious not only to answer my questions but also to provide a great history of the image metadata standards available today (EXIF, IPTC, XMP). His long history with file metadata in general and image metadata in particular makes him a great resource for a serious photographer. Hans' great understanding of the history of modern image metadata standards provides great clarity to his vision about the field of managing unstructured data in general and image metadata in particular. This article is the first part of the interview.

Increase your website traffic for free

vlad — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:00:03 +0000

I decided to run a small project and provide some SEO advice for free for a limited number of people. If you would like me to review your site and give you feedback as to how to optimize your site, then put your website address in the box at the right and submit it. This page is the only place on the site where you can sign up. If you want to get more traffic for your site you can see more details and sign up.

Learn how to send pictures by e-mail in 4 easy steps

vlad — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:25:00 +0000

I am still surprised when I get pictures as attachments in e-mails that I receive. The surprise is that I see humongous file sizes like 3 or 4 Mb. It is obvious to me that those who send me these pictures are sending full size images. Even using DSL, if I have six or seven of these pictures it still takes a while for me to download them and see them. In addition, I am sure that it takes the sender a lot longer to send the email since the upload speeds are much lower than the download speeds on any internet connection. So, how are we to e-mail pictures as attachments? Why is it still difficult? Well, read on.

My pictures counter for October 2009

vlad — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 02:05:58 +0000

How many digital pictures do you have? Have you ever counted them? It’s easy! This month I decided that I will track the number of digital pictures and videos on my hard drive. I think that this little exercise will provide great insight on how many pictures I have and how many I take on a regular basis. So, I hope to be able to provide an update at the end of each month and show you how many pictures & videos I have, how much space they take and how much space I have left on my main hard drive.

Talking about why and how people take pictures. An interview with photography professor Stephen Cysewski.

vlad — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:09:09 +0000

Some time ago I had the privilege to ask professor and photographer Stephen Cysewski some questions. He was very gracious to include lots of details in his answers. Stephen Cysewski is Professor of Computer Applications, Emeritus at University of Alaska Fairbanks and has been living in Alaska since 1967.

Use folders and tags the right way.

vlad — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:00:48 +0000

Folders and tags are two complimentary methods for organizing your digital pictures on your computer. I have written in the past about the differences and similarities of folders and tags and people have written and asked questions (Read Tags vs Folders the big debate). This article explores one key difference between the two methods and how to use it for your own advantage.

What’s really cool in Picasa 3.5

vlad — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:25:16 +0000

Picasa has recently released version 3.5 according to the Picasa blog. They have not updated everyone yet, meaning that when you open up Picasa, it would not prompt you to update. However, you can download the new version if you want. I did that yesterday and played with some of the new features. I believe the new version has some cool new things and some that...well, I'm not sure.

3 simple tips for taking great pictures of children

vlad — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:37:55 +0000

I had a great experience working with my friend John the photographer. As I have indicated in my previous article, John Mueller has come and taken pictures of my children. He didn't only take pictures of my newborn son but also of my three year old daughter. I learned a lot of things from John, about taking pictures of children. In my last article I shared the things I have learned about taking pictures of infants. In this article I want to share some things about taking pictures of toddlers.

4 easy steps for taking great infant pictures

vlad — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:00:51 +0000

I normally don't write much about how to take pictures because I'm not an expert photographer. I love photography but I'm not a great photographer even though I have learned a lot of things. I believe I have improved my photography greatly (read 5 simple things that will improve your photography) but I am so much behind in the creative department. I write this article however, because it is rare when I have the chance to see a good photographer up close and be able to learn a few things from him.

Use Flickr and Facebook to gain traffic for your photo website.

vlad — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:40:16 +0000

Flickr and Facebook are great ways to make your pictures more "visible" on the internet. This way is not very direct but it can be very beneficial. Flickr is the largest photo sharing website (Facebook is catching up quickly) in the world and you can take advantage of its popularity if you do a few things right.

Write a photo blog and make your pictures famous

vlad — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:50:33 +0000

Over the years I have accumulated many travel pictures that I wanted to share on the internet. It was pretty easy to get my pictures published on the internet at first, but then I noticed that hardly anyone was finding my pictures on the internet. Even though I didn't know anything about SEO or page ranking, I realized pretty quickly that having the pictures published on the internet and having people actually come visit my site are two entirely different things.

Adding the right text in the right place will make your pictures visible on the Internet

vlad — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 06:53:43 +0000

Since there are so many photographers and photography websites it is very hard to get your pictures noticed on the internet. You may really be a very talented and experienced photographer and you may indeed have many great pictures. But how to you get the word out on the internet? How do you get your pictures noticed? What do you do to have your pictures show up in an internet search like Google, Yahoo or Bing? Fortunately there are some steps that you can take so that your pictures become "visible". Read on and see what I have found out about making my pictures "visible" on the internet.