Tonight’s workshop included someone who is new at Digital Photography. We filled him in on a few of the basics, which was a good review for the rest of the group.
How do you organize your photos?
Not unlike the shoeboxes of yore, the “My Pictures” folder is insufficiently robust to keep your photos organized and easy to find. There are many available tools that can be used, but only two really stand out for ease of use and universal access:
- Picasa – Google’s photo organizer is available for Windows and Mac (Intel Chips only!). It will look on your hard drive for all photos, finding every jpeg, Photoshop file, and tiff you’ve ever uploaded onto your drive.
- iPhoto – If you’re on a Mac, this comes with iLife, which is either included on your computer or can be had for a mere $79.
Both of these will do the following:
- Allow you to do some basic photo manipulation, like correct white balance, crop, resize, change colors, etc.
- Allow you to label and tag your photos
- Identify photos of people and let you specify who’s who. Later, you can search for them.
- Let you assign a location to your photos so you can see them on a map.
- Let you create albums and slideshows.
- Let you send photos to printers, calendar makers, and more.
Hours of fun! But wait, there’s more.
How do you upload them?
Uploading your photos “to the cloud” means that you can access them from any computer, anywhere with an internet connection. There are a zillion photo sharing sites, and with all of them you need to start with:
- Set up an account. If you have a gmail account, you have free access to Picasa’s online sharing site, Picasaweb. If you have a Yahoo account, you have access to Flickr.com. Otherwise, you’ll have to sign up for an account.
- Some sites charge, others are free. Read the fine print.
We recommend the following sharing sites:
- Picasaweb.google.com – Google’s photo sharing site starts out free, and lets you share photos with people by sending them a URL. There isn’t a lot of community on here, but it’s a good site.
- Flickr.com - Millions of photo afficionados upload photos, comment, organize, print, etc on what is an amazing fun online experience. You can add photos to group pools, share with others, and add photos to other websites. You can
- Smugmug.com – This is more of an album-focused site that allows individuals and families to create some pretty fancy showcases of their photos. You can even sell prints.
We are at the end of the workshop, and didn’t answer all the questions, but everyone is left with an assignment – organize and prepare photos for uploading and sharing, which is going to be a continued subject in our ongoing workshops.
Thanks as always to Ted Curran, our fabulous instructor.
See you next time!
