Organizing Your Digital Photos
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Is your hard drive overrun with digital photos? Having trouble finding the photo of Grandma with little Billy from Thanksgiving two years ago? It sounds like it is time to organize your digital photos.
There are software programs on the market for organizing your digital photos that can make the task easier, but they cost quite a bit of money. You can use the following tips to organize your digital photo collection for free so you can enjoy your photos without spending hours searching your computer for the right one.
What's in a Name?
It turns out quite a lot! Wouldn't it be easier to find your digital photos from last Christmas if they had the word "Christmas" in them? Most digital cameras assign a random name to your photos like "DSCN0291". It makes it difficult to search for photos by name when the names don't make any sense like that. Renaming digital photos one at a time is quite time consuming, though. To save time, try renaming your digital photos in a group.
For instance, let's say you just put all your digital photos from Christmas of 2006 on your hard drive. Rather than renaming each one, select them all, right click and choose "rename". Type in the name "christmas-2006" or whatever makes sense to you, hit enter, and Windows will automatically rename all of the photos using what you typed in followed by a sequential number. That way when you are looking for your Christmas photos, you can search for the word "Christmas" and you should be able to find them more quickly.
Rotate Digital Photos in a Group
Another time consuming task is rotating your digital photos so they are facing the right direction. Rotating them one at a time using photo software can take forever. A much quicker option is to rotate all of your photos that are turned on their side at once. All you have to do is select the photos you want to rotate, right click and choose "Rotate Clockwise" or "Rotate Counterclockwise" and Windows will automatically rotate them all for you. Talk about easy!
Viewing Digital Photos as Thumbnails
No matter how well you have named your photos, you will always benefits from being able to see a thumbnail of the photo to see exactly what it is. Windows usually does a good job of automatically showing you the thumbnail images if it finds a folder full of images. However, sometimes it will just show the photo files as a list or with a non-descript icon next to them, which isn't very helpful when you are trying to find a specific photo. If you find yourself looking at a big batch of generic icons in a folder, choose View --> Thumbnails from the menu at the top of the window. Or, if you want to see a larger preview of the photo, you can choose to view the folder as a filmstrip.
Hopefully these tips will help to get you started on getting your digital photo collection organized so you can find and view them easily.