Snap Happy

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday November 10, 2008

Dan Warne

Winning the war to keep digital photosorganised takes some technical know-how, writes Dan Warne.

Digital photography has solved one big problem - the cost of film and development - but created another: an explosion in the number of photos people take.

Here's how to take control.

Step 1: Get your computer to organise them

If you're still struggling with the built-in photo viewer on your computer then you're punishing yourself. Google makes a great free photo-managing program called Picasa (google.com/picasa), which works on Windows and Linux. Mac users can use Apple iPhoto, which comes with all Macs.

Both apps have some killer features. Picasa has online photo albums with face recognition, letting Google automatically sort Arthur from Martha. You can sync your albums in the Picasa software to Google's PicasaWeb service and once you've uploaded your pictures, Google combs through the faces in your photos and sorts them out while your computer is switched off. You can then view all photos of individual people automatically and even notify them by email when you post a new photo of them.

The 2008 version of Apple iPhoto has a great "events" feature, which automatically splits up your photos into albums based on the period of time they were taken. So, any photos taken within a two, eight or 24-hour period (you choose) will be treated as a separate "event", freeing you from having to manually sort them into albums.

Step 2: Be ruthless

It's time to quell the pics-plosion on your hard disk. When you download pictures from your camera, get into the habit of viewing them immediately, picking out the good ones and deleting the rest on the spot. Both Picasa and iPhoto make this easy.

In Picasa, while you're viewing a slideshow, you can "star" a photo just by clicking the onscreen star button. Once you exit the slideshow it's easy to select all the photos that aren't starred and delete them.

When you're in an iPhoto slideshow, you can assign a rating from one to five for a photo. You can sort photos by rating and delete the poorer ones.

Step 3: Edit your pictures

Picasa and iPhoto have good editing tools built in to do basic photo editing - cropping, rotating, adjusting colours, fixing blemishes and so on. What they don't do is help you merge photos, for example, or clone a part of a picture to a different place.

Photoshop may be the best-known name in photo editing but its $1108 price tag comes as a shock to many. Cheaper options include an online version of Photoshop (photoshop.com) that does the basics with 2GB of free online storage. However, having to upload your photos before you can edit them is a bit annoying.

A better option is Photoshop Elements ($189 and also included free with many scanners). It includes many of the key features of Photoshop, with a simplified interface and some of the pro features removed.

Step 4: Say goodbye to conventional albums

Photo albums have always felt like a bit of a rip-off once you add up the cost of printing the photos, the album and those annoying sticky mounting squares. Not to mention the hours you'll spend compiling them.

The digital equivalent is the printed photo book: you arrange your digital photos on the screen in templates, click "order" and a week or two later your professionally printed album arrives. Once you've done one, you'll never again want to put together an album by hand. The results are stunning and the process is pain-free.

Apple now offers photo books to Australian Mac users. A hardcover with 20 pages costs $39.99 and additional pages (up to 100 total) cost $1.29 each. There are many options for Windows users. For example, Blurb.com provides free software for making your book and costs $US29.95 ($43.22) for a 40-page book. There's also Snapfish by Hewlett-Packard (snapfish.com.au), which has photobooks from $19.95.

Step 5: Protect your pics

You can lose your entire photo collection in one fell swoop if your hard drive fails or your computer is stolen. A good way to back up photos is to use a free online gallery such as Flickr (flickr.com) or Google PicasaWeb (picasaweb.com). You can share photos with friends and family without clogging up their email inboxes. You can also download them again later if you lose them from your computer.

It pays to be careful of privacy. Think of the Virgin Atlantic hosties who were sacked for publishing inappropriate comments about airline passengers on Facebook, or the bloke who got caught out when he chucked a sickie and noted this little fact on his Facebook page. Most online photo services allow you to set privacy options for your albums.