photo stuf

Up until now, we’ve mostly dealt with things that you as the user need to do for your computer, but starting with my last post, you’ll notice that I’ll be talking more about things your computer can do for you. Really, none of us wants to buy something that we will be spending all of our time and energy worrying about, and hoping will be ok. Rather, we want something that will enrich our lives and open up new experiences and will help us to accomplish our goals more easily and with greater enjoyment. If you’ve followed my tips up until now, you should pretty much have a smoothly running machine that can give you more enjoyment, fewer headaches, and at a lot lower cost than you may have thought possible.
Pictures
We love them! They fill our minds with memories and evoke emotional responses from us, but sometimes they are a burden to organize. Many of us, and our parents have huge numbers of snapshots and photos tucked away in albums, stuffed into closets, slides sitting in trays never having been viewed for possibly decades, fading away. There’s no doubt that one of the most popular inventions in history is the camera, but until the advent of the modern computer, we really had no way to deal with all of these pieces of ourselves, or how to document what they were, where they were from, and even more importantly, who is the subject of this picture. With any computer made within the past three to five years, it is very possible to form a collection of all your photographs, to name them and to store them in a way that will last for your grandchildren to look at, to hear you describe them, and maybe make a connection with who you are, now.
How then do you store your photographs, put them into context and provide a system for you to use and view them? Any XP machine can download pictures from any USB enabled digital camera and save the files, but needs help when it comes to optimization and organization. Just about every camera also comes with software that was created to help us accomplish that, but some of the experiences I have had with camera manufacturer’s software has been less than encouraging. There are two free programs that I recommend that will help you to organize and optimize your digital photos.
The first one Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition. It helps you to get things organized with your photos, and to do some very light editing. You’ll also find that Adobe will use Album to try and sell you other products, but really, it is very functional software.
The second one is called Picasa, and it is a free tool from Google. This is a pretty cool little program that will help you download your shots and put them into directories based upon download date. It also can help you with some basic editing, such as red-eye removal and straightening and color shift, but where it really starts to shine is in sharing and viewing your photos. First of all, you can view a timeline of all the photos found on your hard drive, you can create slideshows, slideshow discs, to email photos to others, to post your photos to a blog…etc… The list goes on. It is not perfect by any means, but the ways in which it gives you access to using the photos you have is amazing.
As always, I hope that you’ve learnt something, and I hope you know that I am here to try and help you if you have any questions, and I would love to hear from any of you that have feedback, be it positive or negative. Catch you later!