Playing Slide-shows

If you are a photography enthusiast, chances are you already have a high-end camera on hand and have taken thousands of photos already. And just as it would happen in case of traditional photos, organizing this huge number of photos can be a real challenging task.

Ideally, you would like to work on each one of your digital photos, get rid of red eyes and other aberrations; and organize them into meaningful folders. However, digital cameras make it so easy to take photos that very soon you find that your photos are in the thousands and that you are going to be spending a lot of time organizing these photos.

The one advantage of working with a digital camera is that when it is connected to the PC, the software recognizes the camera and makes it easy to download all or just a select few. Not only that, the software keeps these photos organized on the basis of date and time.

You can now use the software to reorganize some of the photos, optimize them and then move them to relevant folders. For example, if you have taken a whole lot of pictures during a vacation amongst which are a few bird pictures, you might want to move the bird pictures into another folder and leave the vacation photos in the same folder.

You should give the folders names that are self-explanatory and will help you find the photos that you want quickly. Typically, special events, people’s names or special dates are good names that will help you remember the photos that you have stored in a particular folder.

Digital images will usually be named as IMG_076, IMG_077, IMG_078 and so on. Move the files to particular folders depending on how relevant they are to one another. You could be tempted to change the name of the files as well but you should remember that you will have to change the names of hundreds of thousands of files – it is simply not worth the time.

Furthermore, the digital camera has provided a certain chronological system for all the photos. By changing the name of the files, it is possible that you disturb this system and confuse the camera on what files have been downloaded and which have not. What you could do is identify a few photos that you are very happy with and add some more meaningful information such as the event or name of a person.

Most software programs will also allow you to tag all the photos. A ‘tag’ is just a word or phrase that will help you organize the photos better as also to help you find it when you search for it at a later date.

For example, if you are a bird lover and have a folder full of bird photos but want a particular one with some specific characteristics you will be able to identify it by the tag given to it. When you use the Search function of the software, you can search based on the folder name and on the tag. If you have taken plenty of photos of a particular magpie, by searching ‘magpie’ you can view all the photos of magpies that you have taken.

Since you are moving precious memories into your PC, you have to make sure that you take regular backups of all your photos. Depending on how often you pull out your camera, fix a backup schedule so that all the new photos keep getting backed up.

Now, what makes digital photos so attractive is not just that they are easier to organize and manage but the fact that you can just as easily share them with your friends. You can compose a message and choose the photo as an attachment. With a broadband connection, it should be possible for the email attachment to go through in a few seconds.

Finally, the software will also allow you to put together a side-show of your favorite pictures and help you play it when you want it and at the pace you want it. You can have a different slides how for a different set of photos. In fact, if you so desire you can even have some sound effects with the slides how to put forth a truly impressive performance.