How to Manage Your Digital Photos

The beauty of digital photography is that we don't need to use film and can just upload our images to the computer. The problem is that before too long we have thousands, if not tens of thousands of digital images. How do you find anything? In another article I mention a software solution from Google called Picassa. There are other solutions such as My Pixel Vault. Some people may not want to use Picassa because it is constantly scanning for new images and it will catalog only by date. Some people may want to sort their photos by category and not prefer a scanning option. There are other software solutions including using Microsoft as your image catalog and search engine. Some will find this method cumbersome, but one of the true advantages is that it forces you to look at all your image files. Typically, we tend to save everything. There is no reason to save out-of-focus shots, duplicates, bracket exposures and other photographic trash you may have accumulated.

Here are steps to managing your digital photos using Windows Explorer.

Instructions

1

Locate your photos using Microsoft Explorer. Select the image file with your mouse and right-click on the file and select PROPERTIES. When the properties box opens, click on SUMMARY.

2

Give the image a title that corresponds to the file name. Enter in the SUBJECT and AUTHOR. Enter in KEYWORDS that you can use when you search to identify the picture. If I had a picture of a red apple, I would type in red, apple, fruit, nature, environment and any other word I could think of to categorize the image. Once you have finished entering data, click apply and then click OK.

3

You can also click on the ADVANCED tab to see all the image information including the data you just entered. It also references the original creator, date, size and resolution. This will also include all the parameters of Windows Explorer you look at when searching for images.

4

To find all the photos that have the same keywords simply open Windows Explorer and click on search to open the search panel. Select the location you want it to search, like MY PICTURES, and type in the keyword attributes for the search. When you have added in the information, click SEARCH.

5

The search results are displayed in the Explorer window. You can have them displayed as thumbnails and click or drag any image. The time investment for this method is great initially to catalog all the images you have. However, the maintenance is not bad when you are only cataloging 20 images at a time.