Digital Photography Super Guide: How to Organize Your Photos. This is part of a new ongoing series on digital photography. Look for later installments covering various aspects of the topic, from choosing a camera to editing photos, to printing them. If you're serious about digital photography, or just want to be able to find, share, and protect your best images easily, you need a workflow. Sure some people just snap away on their phone or point and shoot, and show the photos to whoever's around on the back of the device. The next, very popular practice is to simply copy photos onto a folder on your PC's hard drive, and then maybe attach them to an email to friends and family. But these approaches often leave users at a loss when trying to find that special image or set of photos among the thousands they've shot, and don't help with organizing groups of photos. Pro and pro- sumer photographers usually take a much more structured approach, involving a workflow that includes organized file naming, tagging, and rating. This way, they can easily access their best shots based on when, where, subject, or even camera settings. Anyone who takes pictures can benefit from a well- though- out process when it comes to importing and organizing digital photos. We'll discuss the main steps in photo workflow using three different levels of software: Operating system–included tools—Windows 7's Import Pictures and Videos, Windows 8's Photos app, Mac OS X's Image Capture, and Ubuntu's Shotwell; Entry- level and free photo apps—Apple i. How To Organize Your Life: The 10 Habits of Highly Organized People. How To Organize Your Life: The 10 Habits of Highly Organized People. Highlight text to share via Facebook and Twitter. Photo ($1. 5, 4 stars), Windows Photo Gallery (Free, 4 stars), Google Picasa (Free, 4. Nero Kwik Media (Free, 3 stars); enthusiast photo software—Adobe Photoshop Elements ($1. Corel Paint. Shop Photo Pro X5 ($7. Serif Photo. Plus X5 ($8. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 ($1. Makeuseof.* –> to support files named. Proven Simple Tips to Organize Your Files on Windows The 4 Proven Simple Tips to Organize Your Files on Windows Read More or use a specific application? Feel free to share with us. How to Organize Your E-mail Inbox. Let your inbox fill up, and you may face missed deadlines. There is an effective way to process and organize your inbox; it is indeed possible to empty your inbox, says Peggy. Chapter 2 Organize Your Data. Although there are infinite ways to organize data into complex, multitiered systems, you're going to take the smart and lazy approach to organization: You'll arrange stuff only as much as is. Windows 10’s All Apps list functions a bit differently than the All Programs list in Windows 7. You can’t just drag-and-drop shortcuts or right-click All Programs and select Explore anymore. Use this trick to add your own. Apple's Aperture 3 ($7. Cyber. Link Photo. Director ($1. 20, 3. ACDSee Pro ($7. 5, 4 stars ), Corel After. Shot Pro ($8. 0, 2. The big kahuna of photo editing—Adobe Photoshop CS6—doesn't handle workflow itself, but uses the included and very capable Adobe Bridge application for these steps. Importing A little extra effort when you're transferring photos from your digital camera to your computer can pay off big dividends later, when you're hunting for that special image. You have three basic choices when it comes to importing digital photos: You can simply copy files from your camera's memory card to a folder on your computer, use the operating system's photo importing features, or use third- party software's import feature. The first option gives you pretty much zero in the way of organizing, aside from simply having photos possibly shot in a similar time period in the same folder. When you import, as opposed to just copying files from the memory card, you get big benefits. These start with file naming: Instead of those indecipherable names like DSC4. JPG, you can usually tell the importer to name the files meaningfully, using the date, or a sequence like . Other benefits include tagging and rating, which we'll cover next. Windows built- in import feature lets you add tags at the time of import, but i. Photo only lets you name the time- based . Ubuntu's included F- Spot photo manager also lets you apply tags at import. Windows 8 actually takes a step back when it comes to built- in operating system photo import tools. With Microsoft's latest OS, when you plug camera media into a USB port for the first time, you'll see a notification at the upper right asking you to . Gone are the tagging and pattern renaming options. Instead, the import is handled by the new- style Photos app, but of course you can override this behavior by installing any of the photo programs mentioned here. Most Mac users will take advantage of the excellent importing and organizing capabilities in either i. Photo (see below) which comes with all new Macs or costs $1. Mac App Store on its own, or the excellent pro workflow tool/editor Aperture ($7. But for those who for some reason don't take advantage of either, there's still OS X's built- in Image Capture utility. And it's about as basic as it gets. It's somewhat surprising that a platform known for serving creative professionals would offer a far less capable photo import utility than the traditionally more business- oriented Windows operating system does. OS X's Image Capture does show you details about the photos from their EXIF data (see below) and lets you choose what to import. But unlike Windows built- in importer, there's no ability to apply keyword tags, to rename the files on a pattern, or to create groups based on capture times. You can choose a target folder for the import and there's a check box for deleting the files after import (something I don't recommend until you're sure the photos are safely transferred). Capture does support and display raw camera files (more in a moment), whereas Windows requires a codec installation for that, but beyond that, Capture is as bare- bones as it gets. Entry- level software doesn't add a whole lot to the import experience, but they do help with organizing. For example, Windows Live Photo Gallery adds the ability to review, organize, and group photos during import. It also lets you view thumbnails of all the candidate import images and check and uncheck those you actually want. You can name folders for photos that go together, such as from the same event—otherwise the folders will just get a date as their name. Picasa doesn't let you apply tags at import, though it does let you star individual photos before import. Software such as Adobe Photoshop Elements makes it much it much easier for Windows users to import raw camera files. These files contain all the data from your camera's sensor and allow for far more control later when it comes to adjusting exposure and color. You also get to manipulate some metadata during import, but as you'll see in the next section, the pro tools offer a lot more. You can edit metadata, entering things like copyright or contact info. Tools at this level and the next usually don't touch your original image file, but rather keep it as though it were a digital . This does mean that, in order to view the photo in other software or to send it through email or share it online, you'll need to export the image. It also often means that, even if a photo is already on your hard drive, you'll have to import it into the app before you can work with it. There are a couple of compelling reasons to import with a truly powerful app like Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture. In addition to letting you import raw camera files, you can start viewing them full- size and editing them even before the import is done. Beyond this, these apps let you apply fixes, effects, and even custom preset adjustments, during image import. These apps also are usually excellent and fast at importing large raw camera files. Not all raw importers are the same, since interpreting the raw sensor data is not a simple conversion, but requires some interpretation. Finally, I should mention a couple of niche apps that are just about importing images. The standard professional tool for this purpose is Photo Mechanic. This app, at $1. 50, really is only appropriate for pros for whom speed of importing is the ultimate concern. Indeed, in my testing Photo Mechanic did let me preview and import images more quickly than Lightroom, though not faster than Aperture. At a lower- end level, Smart Photo Import is a popular search result, and creates a folder structure based on capture dates, which can be helpful for organization, but it doesn't offer rating or keyword tagging.
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