Digital Picture Organization

Last night, everyone that took a picture at my family’s Thanksgiving dinner party used a digital camera. This was quite a first, since normally there would be atleast one person with a “legacy” 35mm camera or even disposable. If your family is anything like mine than it would be safe to expect this week’s internet connection to be slightly slower due to all the emails that are chock full of high resolution digital picture attachments!

Now you may have noticed in the gallery that I take a lot of digital pictures. I admit that as a digital shutterbug, I tend ot fire away and just tell my wife and kids, “keep smiling.. one of these will turn out ok.” Sound familiar? As of today I count over 20 CDs full of digital pictures. Each CD holds about 650Mb of data so we’re looking at roughtly 13 Gigs of pictures!

Two questions come to mind with all those pictures. How do I organize all those pictures and how do I view them?

My attempt at solving the first problem came in the form of a little Ruby script. This little script that I wrote basically groups all the pictures that you took for a given day and creates a folder for that group’s date. For example, if I took pictures that were on 11/25/2004 then all my pictures would be in a folder called 11_25_2004.

A typical tree would look like:

11_25_2004
– IMG0003.JPG
– IMG0004.JPG
…

11_26_2004
– IMG005.JPG
-IMG006.JPG
….

I’ve placed the code in the bottom right hand of this main page for you to look at and use. This script needs an interpreter to run, so you’ll have to download the Ruby interpreter at http://ruby-lang.org/en.

This little script has been very helpful this past year for emptying my memory sticks onto my computer for organization.

Now about the second problem. If you have Windows XP, you have the helpful Picture Viewer for folders marked as “Picture Folders” But if you’re on windows9x, windows2000 what are the alternatives? Well 3 months ago I came across this very cool tool called Picasa I discovered it from looking inside the google more pages. If you’ve been a pure PC user all your life you’ll be absolutely amazed by this piece of software. It will allow you to view hundreds of your pictures and edit them w/o modifying the original. Also its very small and very fast. You can select pictures and hold them on your dashboard and export them in varying format resolutions. The goal of Picasa is to preserve your originals and allow you to distribute your cropped/edited pictures for friends or your online gallery.

As I said earlier, if you’ve been a pure PC user all your life you’ll be amazed by Picasa. But if you’re a Mac OSX user — after the first glance at the user interface you’ll say to your self, “THIEVES!” The inteface is amazingly like iPhoto for the Mac OS iLife suite. If anything, Apple should be flattered, if not piping mad

Anyway hopefully this holiday season these two tools may help you with all your digital picture taking.