May is National Photography Month, and we celebrate this fantastic art form by displaying and treasuring the photos that emerge from our cameras.
Last time we looked at a method for sorting our hard copy photos and then mounting them in photo albums.
Today we look at the coolest trend for two decades and counting, digital photography!
Digital Photos
Of course digital photos are extremely popular, and organizing your photos on your computer is much easier and faster. In recent years more and more people have moved away from film cameras and converted over to digital cameras.
The benefits of the digital format are numerous. These benefits include
- less cost
- a huge amount of space on your camera removable disc or card for numerous pictures without worrying about whether they “come out alright” or not
- and the safety of the actual picture. This safety net is due to your photo being loaded onto the computer and less subject to flood or fire, like a photo album would be.
Here are the steps to loading and organizing your digital photos into your computer:
1. After you have taken the photos you want, connect your camera to your computer using the USB cable provided with the camera.
2. Some software (usually provided by your operating system) will cause windows to pop up with questions and prompts. Your digital camera might also come with software to load on to your computer, if you desire.
3. As you follow the prompts you will be asked to create a “folder”. This step could be prompted before you download the photos, or it could happen simultaneously with the download. This computer folder that you are creating is like the manila envelopes that I mentioned earlier in this chapter in which you would place your photos as you sort and organize them.
4. When you are creating the folder the software will ask you to give a title to your folder. This should be very descriptive of the photos in that folder. For example: “Summer vacation 2012”, or “Uncle Jonny’s wedding”. Most software will automatically date the folder, but if yours does not, then you need to include a date in the name of the folder.
5. With most software, at some point in the process a button will become visible which will prompt you to click it to import the pictures
6. Then the software will begin copying the photos from your camera via the cable you hooked up and placing them in the folder you created. You will see a “progress bar” display on your screen which will show you how the download is progressing.
7. After you have downloaded the pictures unplug your camera from the computer. You are now free to go view the photos you downloaded. Go to the folder location on your computer and open the folder and view.
8. You can organize your numerous photo folders by date, alphabetically, by event, or many other options. This is an important step in the process, for without a good organizational method, your photos will be difficult to locate. A friend of mine did not have a method of organizing his digital photos when he first started downloading and filing his pictures. He downloaded his pictures into folders that he just named with the date of the picture. He had not included the event or the occasion of the photos in his title. Years of using that method has left his picture files without meaningful organization, and he is left with folders named only with dates. Later in his organizational life, it became apparent to him that he needed to title his photo folders with more meaningful names that were descriptive of the occasion or event. He has begun doing that very thing, and now his photo files are beautifully organized with descriptive names and dates.
9. It does no good to organize and save your digital photos in this fashion if your computer crashes and you lose all the data on it. So, make sure you have a backup of your files. This could be done by a drive attached to your computer, or via a commercial backup service on the internet which charges a monthly fee to back up your data. I just bought my own back-up drive from Best Buy for $88. It automatically backs up my files and photos every day and stores them in a safe location.
Next time: Scanning and uploading digital photos to websites for display and storage