Picture organization software

K

kur1j

Gawd
Joined
Sep 13, 2003
Messages
682
Ok my mom and sister do not understand how to organize pictures or how to BACK THEM UP. Every time that they lose a picture or can't find it they blame it on the "stupid computer" when every single time it has been them deleting a folder that they don't know what it is and I go digging through the recycle bin and find 400+ pictures that they deleted just because they didn't know what the folder is for or what was in it. I just dont understand it. Then after I restore it they blame the computer for putting it there or it was put there due to the computer "Crashing"... don't get that one but whatever.

I have windows XP on the machine and my mom/dad/sister all have seperate profiles. My sister will take some pictures and then put them in her "My Picture" folder then 2 days later my mom sees there are other pictures on the camera go into her profile and then put 40-50 of the SAME pictures in her "My Pictures" folder. After about 4 days she starts looking through the pictures that she just put in her "My Pictures" folder and will start deleteing them with "because they have red eye and it looks creepy". Just the other day I found about 90 something pictures in the Recycle Bin all with some type of red eye. I told her its easy to fix and tried showing her how to do it in in photoshop but that was a stupid idea.

So in other words do yall have any suggestions on how to keep all of these pictures organized? I have a file server that I can save them on but do yall have any websites that will give them instructions on how them to keep the pictures organized?
 
I use Picasa. Works great for organization and basic editing, although you might have to show them how to use it (it's not that hard).
 
G-Nome said:
I use Picasa. Works great for organization and basic editing, although you might have to show them how to use it (it's not that hard).
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Cool I saw it on the website but never tried it.
 
ACDSee still kills the rest once you've used it. Vieweing, organizing, editing... It does it all for less system resources than just about anything else I've ever seen. Sure, there are a few free platforms out there but I've not found anything that works as well. Definitely worth the money. It's $50 and well worth it.
 
I used ACDSee for a few months, really great piece of software. After using it for a while, it had a good number of things that bugged me with it, mainly UI things that didn't work the way I'd like. Also you can tag pictures with people's names and such, but it stores the info to photos in a non-universal tag, for lack of better words. So if you ever wanted to switch photo management software, you lose alot of your tagging work. I'm now using iView Media Pro, which after getting used to is definitly more efficient and clean. Not to meantion conforming to standards better, tag-wise. For the price, ACDSee is great however, and I really did enjoy it for the most part.

However, for your mom/sister, I'd fully reccomend using Picasa. I started off with it until my photo collection got too complex, but it's a great piece of software for people like your family. Very fast, clean, easy to use. You can do color fixes and redeye in 1 click, really a great tool for less than skilled computer users.
 
Just to continue with this topic how do yall suggest organizing the actual photos? For example my mom has a 256MB and a 512MB CF card that she uses and she will take about 20 photos at some kinda family gathering and then 10 photos of people at work and then 2 months down the road take 10 or 15 more some where else. As you can see its not just a certain outing so putting a them in a single folder gets everything really disorganized.

I finally got her to use Picasa2 and she kinda has folders everywhere and named all kinda different things (some have dates on them, some have a name of what was done etc). So what would be some kinda semi-standard for me to tell her to use to kinda keep things more organized than what she has done.

The only real way I have thought of doing something like this and getting some kinda semi-standard is getting her to upload the pictures into a certain folder and name the folder for that specific outing. Or getting her to just keep the files on the CF card and when it gets kinda full get her to put a date range of the pictures.

If there are any better suggestions please feel free to share them.
 
Whenever pictures come off the flash card make sure they also get backed up on CD. It's a little harder to accidentally erase a CD.
 
Picasa is a good piece of software and I'd recommend it (although I don't have a ton of experience with these programs as I use folders and names to organize things...god forbid)

But people like your family I will honestly say would probably benefit from an Apple machine. I'm no Apple lover, I need maximum capability my streamlined Windows (for those who would like a faster windows, look for Hacking XP, it's a decent book, it got me started). But iPhoto and Apple's All-in-One-Software-and-OS is an all in one solution for those who don't know a ton about computers.
 
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