When Your Photo Filing System Fails You
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009I’m excited to be posting what I hope will be the first of many blogs entries. You may notice in my bio that I’m a self-described “gadget girl” – actually, my husband calls me that, too. I’m always fascinated by the latest electronic tool that helps make life easier. I’m also a newly minted photography enthusiast and I’m not alone. After years of being told we have good photographic eyes, we’ve recently made the leap from a point-and-shoot camera to a full-blown digital SLR (dSLR).
Falling dSLR prices helped me come to terms with the intimidation factor of controlling the camera settings and I decided to take my digital memories to a whole new level. Like other “mamarazzi” out there, I am on a quest to make my new son the most photographed child in history. But all of that snapping comes at a price. No, digital is still cheaper than film. The price I’m referring to is your lost sanity when you can’t find that one adorable shot in the series of thousands of images you’ve shot and kept (after all storage is cheap, too) because your filing system has failed you.
Solution? You need software to assist with image management.
My recommendation? Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.
Now before you get concerned about seeing “Photoshop” in the name, just know that you don’t have to be a professional photographer to use Lightroom. It’s very user-friendly. Plus, I’m only recommending you immediately dive into one of five modules, the Library. With this module alone, you’re just a few clicks away from the brave new world of the photography enthusiast. You’ll create a true image database so you can:
- Catalog images from multiple folders, drives or disks without changing their storage location,
- Keyword tag images at import or after the fact,
- Rate files to allow for quick viewing of only those magical moments,
- Compare similar images side by side to quickly determine which to discard,
- Feel comfortable about the camera in manual mode – Lightroom lets you teach yourself to improve your images by storing all of the camera settings that let you capture the best pictures,
- Stop shooting in any image format other than RAW. You retain the most image information with this format and Lightroom lets you export to JPG with ease.
All these features will mean less time behind the computer screen sifting through images and more time behind the camera. If learning all of this sounds a bit overwhelming, there are many Web sites and books available for tips and tutorials, but my favorite is the video training available from Lynda.com. After you’ve mastered the Library module, you can move on to the Develop module, which lets you complete many of the same affects from Adobe Photoshop with a much flatter learning curve.
