Taking care of the little things now

Prompted by a well timed cartoon from What the Duck on Friday 13th, is it time to think of your answer now..



With so many pictures taken now, it's quite a task for everyone to keep up with the location of those family pictures; you know the ones of the kids as they grow up, and the important moments in family life. Many professional photographers also have the similar problems and there are many ways to solve this.

I faced this very same question some years ago when my wife asked, have you still got those pics of the kids from a few years ago... my response was oh yes of course I have there on the computer, then a dawning realisation that she'd probably never seen the pictures either. So then I realised that digital had done two things to my photo audience; made it me and the PC, and cut out mostly everybody else. Sometimes you need these kind of prompts to come up with a course of action. Here's mine.

• Organise all the pictures now, and do it always in the future
• Find a way to share photos again like you did with prints from films
• Hard disks crash more often that photo albums got burnt so back it up

In my case the photo organisation came in the shape of iView Media Pro, now called Microsoft Expression Media and an almost unhealthy addiction to Chris Breeze's downloader pro. So now I import all the images I take in one machine through downloader pro. It puts them in a structured folder based on dates, cameras and adds metadata (kind of like notes and comments scrawled on the back of photos in the past) to the image files. Then Expression Media looks at the structure and catalogues it all. I can go through my stuff filter out the rubbish - and delete it - then add extra metadata to images that are important to me. Important can mean they're good images or they mark some valuable point in time.

The way to share means things like making it simple for my new and best pictures to be copied to an SD card and put in the LCD photoframe in lounge, and also to make prints. I think I printed more picutres in the last two years than I had in the previous six. This doesn't mean making big prints, but it does mean making prints even 6x4 inch ones, or several on a larger A4 sheet. In these cases the all out quality is not important, but the speed of getting the prints to the audience is. If you use Canon printers try a bit of software that probably comes with your printer called Easy Photo Print - it does what it's name says. Most other brands will have something similar. Actually it in the printer companies interests to help you make more prints since then you buy more ink and paper. You can get latest versions of the Canon software from their software center: http://software.canon-europe.com.

I then backup the images and Expression media catalogues to an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ which sits on my network at home. I use four 320GB disks in mine, and also have it set to automatically back up to a USB external hard drive so I can do something I couldn't do with film. Have it stored in another place; simply taking the disk to my office and leaving it in the draw works for me.

So if the cartoon makes you think, then it's a good thing, if it makes you do something about the problem and reduce or eliminate the gap in your family photo history it's even better.

If you want to take a detailed view of the problem and books are your thing then the almost industry standard bible is Peter Krogh's The DAM book.


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