Managing digital photos
Published 4:00 pm Monday, November 30, 2009
Do you wish you could find specific digital photos quickly and easily? Every digital photo has textual information stored with itand you can add to it. Using free programs, you apply multiple keywords (or tags) to your photo. These words help you quickly locate photos on your computer.
Today I’m going to highlight Picasa which is free from Google. This program has great functions you can use to enhance and manage your photos.
First Picasa takes an inventory of all photos on your computer. Let’s assume you have photos in folders and subfolders. Suppose you have a folder for pictures of your son Jeff. However, some of the photos in the folder also include other people.
Select one such photo in Picasa, choose View Tags, and add as many tags as you like. We’ll start with “jeff, grandpa, dave, sailing, florida.” When you do a search for “dave” and “sailing” this photo will be displayed. Picasa doesn’t care that it’s in the “Jeff” folder.
It would be tedious to tag photos one by one, so Picasa lets you select a group of photos to tag. (You can also delete tags.) The tags you assign are actually stored with the photo, so they can be used with other photo software.
In addition to tagging, you can select photos to be part of a Picasa album. If desired, change the order of the photos. Play an album as a slide show on your computer. A photo can be part of multiple albums.
Picasa has cool photo editing tools for quick fixes. The program’s conservative strategy is that your editing is not committed to the actual photo. Your original remains untouched. All changes are maintained by Picasa. When you view or print the photo using Picasa, your editing is displayed. (If you are certain you love the editing, you must intentionally save the changes to the file. It just doesn’t happen automatically.)
You can rotate a photo, crop it, straighten it (get that ocean perfectly level), and eliminate redeye. Picasa can do its own analysis to adjust contrast, lighting, and shadows for you. All you have to do is click the button named I Feel Lucky. So-o-o easy! Many times the result is great. When it’s not, click Undo.
The Tuning functions let you make your own adjustments to highlights, fill light, shadows, and color temperature. The Effects functions include sharpen, sepia, black & white, warmify, film grain, tint, saturation, soft focus, and glow. You can experiment with theseand Undo what you don’t like.
Other free programs are FastStone Image Viewer and Windows Photo Gallery. In fact, Photo Gallery comes with Microsoft Vista. Be advised, though, that Photo Gallery automatically saves changes to your original photo. If you want to leave the original untouched, use File/Make a Copy. FastStone Image Viewer asks if you want to save your changes. If so, you can overwrite the original or create a new file.
For sharing photos on the web, Picasa can be linked to your free Google account. You control who can see which photos. When Win7 replaces Vista, Windows Live Photo Gallery will do something similar.
Lastly, if you want other details about your photo, select a photo and right-click. Choose Properties. You see date and time, camera model/make, aperture, shutter speed, focal length, metering mode, ISO speed, etc.
I believe you will love using photo software to enhance and manage your digital photos. You can start now even if you already have hundreds of digital photos. One caution: Make sure you understand your software so you don’t lose originals unwittingly.
Jane Francis is the owner of Personal Computer Training, serving the North Coast. For more information contact her by calling (503) 470-0885 or email jane@personalcomputertraining.us .
