Put your photos in order

Organize and classify your memories on your computer

By Deena Waisberg

Toronto resident Chad Sapieha recently got married. He loaded all of his wedding photos onto his computer — all 500 of them. With his photos preserved digitally, he won’t have to worry about losing hard copies or dealing with faded photos. Sapieha is also creating a digital photo library so the pictures will be a lot easier to find and view than if he’d dumped them all into one big folder.

Quick step-by-step Instructions

• instructions to set your monitor’s resolution
• instructions to download pictures in Windows Vista
• instructions to burn a CD using Windows Photo Gallery

Optimize your monitor

Before creating a library, you’ll want to optimize your monitor to view the photos. Start by setting the monitor resolution. The default is often set to 800 × 600 pixels, but Caralee McLellan, media lecturer at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, recommends that you choose a higher resolution. “You’ll see more detail then,” she says.

Sapieha has his monitor resolution set at 1280 × 1024. McLellan also recommends that you select the highest colour quality option: 32-bit (millions of colours). “If your monitor is set to display only 256 colours, the pictures will look blotchy and chunky, especially skin tones,” she explains.

Show step-by-step instructions to set your monitor’s resolution

• Go to the Control Panel.
• Click on Personalization, then Display Settings.
• Under Colors select Highest (32 bit) and under Resolution move the slider towards High to choose a setting. For example: 1024 x 768.
• Click Apply > OK.

Find a home for your pictures

Next, you’ll want to select a central location to organize and manage your digital photos. The Pictures folder was created for that purpose. From this folder you can create subfolders for your images. Or, use Windows Photo Gallery, a more sophisticated image-editing and organizing program.

Show step-by-step instructions to download pictures

• Connect your camera to the computer, or insert the camera’s memory card into your computer’s memory card slot.
• An AutoPlay wizard appears. Select Import pictures.
• Click Options to choose a place (folder) to save the pictures. The Pictures folder is the default location. Click Next.
• Choose a Tag for the pictures (for example, Summer Holidays 2007), and click Import.
• Check the box marked “Erase after importing” if you want to automatically delete the photos off your camera once they’re been transferred to your PC.
• The photos are downloaded to the Pictures folder. When the process is complete, a screen will tell you the transfer was successful.

Rename your photos

Digital cameras assign pictures alphanumeric names. But HP1M0181 is not easy to remember, is it? So you’ll want to rename your photos. You can rename all the pictures by entering a name into the Tag field when you import them. Sapieha initially named his honeymoon photos Honeymoon 1, Honeymoon 2, etc.

This was a start but it still wasn’t ideal for locating a particular honeymoon picture. “We decided to give the photos more individual names, so they would be easier to identify later,” he explains. For example, Hoola_Girl.

McLellan advises that you keep your file names short, because the computer will truncate a long name. She also suggests using an underscore instead of a space between words, which will prevent problems if you want to post your pictures online. You can add a date to each individual picture, but this can get cumbersome. McLellan recommends that you add the date to the folder (or subfolder), instead.

Keep the best, junk the rest

Now it’s time to prune your collection. “Edit out what you are not interested in. Otherwise, you’ll end up with photos you never want to look at again,” recommends McLellan. Keep the pictures that are in focus, that have a compelling subject and that tell a story.

The default thumbnail view in both programs (which shows a small image of the photo) is probably the best way to look at a large number of photos quickly to eliminate the obvious poor ones. But to catch finer errors, you might want to view the photos in a larger format: in the Pictures folder, select Slide Show. Adjust the thumbnail size in by clicking Views and selecting Large or Extra Large icons.

Sort your digital pictures into folders

Within the Pictures folder you can create subfolders for different groups of photos. Sapieha decided on ceremony, reception and honeymoon. As your collection grows, your sorting system may change and become more sophisticated. McLellan suggests creating a folder for each year and creating category subfolders within it: for example, home, work and vacation.

Once you’ve moved the files into the appropriate subfolders, tinker with the viewing order. Within a folder, you can move your favourites to the front by dragging them. Windows Photo Gallery allows you to arrange the photos in many ways including date taken, recently imported and star rating, among others.

Windows Photo Gallery also has a useful Add Tag feature that allows you to tag photos with a keyword. Imagine you tag all the “cake” photos with that keyword. You can then view pictures by keyword, and the program will present only the cake pictures.

As the years progress, it will be easier to find photos you want to retrieve if you’ve sorted and organized them.

Burn digital pictures to CD photo albums

So you’ve got your photo library set up. But if you’re savvy, you’ll also archive your photos so you’ll still have them if your computer has a meltdown.

McLellan says that recordable CDs or DVDs (called CD-Rs and DVD-Rs), which cost about one dollar each or less, are the best way to go. Invest in quality discs. The gold ones tend to be more stable than the green ones, she says, and are reputed to last longer.

Today’s computers come with a built-in DVD burner (which can also burn CDs) and software. Windows Media Gallery’s CD burning wizard will do the trick. Click on the instructions below to learn how to burn your photos onto CD or archive your images.

Show step-by-step instructions to burn a CD using Windows Photo Gallery

• In Windows Photo Gallery, select the photos you wish to burn from All Pictures and Videos > Pictures and choose Burn from the menu along the top. This launches the CD burning wizard.
• Select Data Disc if you want to view the images on a computer, or choose Video DVD if you want to be able to put the disc in your DVD player and view the pictures on your TV.
• Insert a blank CD into your disc drive.
• Enter a name for your CD.
• Click Burn to disc. The burner writes the pictures to CD.

McLellan recommends that you archive every time you put approximately 100 new photos into the library. When you’re downloading, leave the session open so you can add more photos later. That way you won’t forget.

You might be tempted to compress your photos so you can fit more on a CD. If your photos are in JPEG format (the format digital cameras usually save pictures in), this isn’t a good idea. “Most JPEGs are already compressed, and when you further compress them, it will degrade the quality of the picture,” explains McLellan.

CD-Rs generally hold either 650 or 700 MB of data while DVD-Rs hold close to 5 GB — that translates to about 325 pictures on CD or about 2,350 on DVD, assuming each picture is 2 MB. And finally, it’s a good idea to label your disc and even print out an index sheet to include in the case.

Happy organizing!