Digital Camera Photo Cataloging Manipulating and Sharing

[florida_guy]

O.K. The batteries for my new digital camera are charging as I type. I bought an Olympus C-750 Ultra Zoom - 4 Mega pixel with 10x zoom because the 10x zoom was important to me. These links will tell you more about my camera if you are interested. These sites were very helpful to me in comparing cameras and I highly recommend them.

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/ol...ew/index.shtml

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2003_reviews/c750uz.html

Unfortunately my life if very busy right now and I'm just getting over a cold that has seriously hindered my productivity. Therefore, I'm going to have to restrain myself from playing with it too much but I want to get your opinions on some things.

I am going to need a program that makes it quick and easy to crop, resize, "quick fix", and catalog (describe and organize) photos.

I have done some research on this myself on the web since I didn't have the energy to do much else.

This is what I've concluded thus far but am eager to hear your opinions...

Photoshop is way to expensive and way to hard to learn for me.

Paint Shop Pro 8.0 is close to Photoshop in functionality and is much less expensive but it is also hard to learn and does way more than I need.

My current image program ACDSee 3.0 even in the updated version just released 6.0 is way behind the curve of the programs I'm about to talk about in the area of cataloging.

I've looked briefly at a few others but I'm not going to go into all of them here unless you bring them up which I welcome if you have experience with them.

The two options I'm considering at the moment are...
1) Paint Shop Photo Album (PSPA) 4.0 ($39-$49)
2) PhotoShop Album 2.0 (PSA) and PhotoShop Element ($89-$129)

I'm having a bit of trouble evaluating them because the trial version of PhotoShop Album 2.0 is seriously crippled.

At the moment I'm leaning towards option 1 because I can do almost everything I want with it in one program.

Option 2 gives me a lot more power because of Element and some features in PSA that PSPA doesn't have but it seems to be a lot more buggy and I'm not at all convinced I need all the power of Element (which is "PhotoShop for the masses" - not as powerful but easier to use)

I don't want to spend a lot of time putting descriptions on my photos and then end up losing all of that work because I decide I need to change to a different program down the road so its important that I make the right decision up front.

Any input would, as always be greatly appreciated.

[m-mmeyer]

I use PS elements but I only use 10% of it at best. But it does do a good job of resizing and such. My canon came with a program that does some of they same stuff but I found PS to work better so I don't use it much anymore. I tried album and didn't care for the trail version so I didn't give the full version a chance to redeem itself.
As far as renaming and filing I work in windows and use a lot of different folders to separate things, 1 thing if your new to digital photos, try to name the photo right away or at least put into a named folder right away! When you look back at a folder full of hundreds of photos and they all are named file11111.*** file11112.*** and so on it is impossible to figure out what is what!
I try to name each photo as a dump it in to my computer and put them into a named folder such as "summer trip 2003" or whatever. It makes it 100% easier to find something.
Oh 1 more thing keep all photos filed under 1 main folder on your drive that makes easier to make your mandatory back-up cd or cds easier to make. I back up my photos (all of them) every month on to a dvd I am up to 2.5Gb so it that or 3 cds. Remember it only takes one mistake to crash your computer and lose ALL of your photos! Hope any of that helps!


Matt

[florida_guy]

Originally posted by m-mmeyer
I tried album and didn't care for the trail version so I didn't give the full version a chance to redeem itself.
As far as renaming and filing I work in windows and use a lot of different folders to separate things, 1 thing if your new to digital photos, try to name the photo right away

The beauty of these cataloging programs is that you don't have to worry so much about names and folders.

For instance suppose you have a picture of a sunset over the ocean with your significant other standing on the beach while on your trip to Florida. What to you name this? Where to you file it?

With these cataloging programs you can assign (tags in PhotoShop Album, keywords in Paint Shop Photo Album)

You could give this picture a keyword of sunset, ocean, beach, sweetheart, Florida, and vacation.

Then 3 years from now if you want to see all the pictures you've taken of sunsets you use the programs search feature to search for sunset... this same picture would show up if you searched for Florida, it would also show up if you searched for beach.

It doesn't matter where you store it on your computer or what you name it as long as you put keywords on it you can find it.

You can also limit the search to pictures taken in 2002 or between certain dates, etc.

You can do batch keywords to a whole bunch of pictures. You can put descriptions that show up in slide shows that are easy to create. You could title the picture I described above "End of trip." and put a description "We drove from here to the airport and our flight was delayed 2 hours."

You can create a Video CD that will play on a computer or TV and take a slide show that shows these titles and descriptions home for Christmas and everyone can view them at their leisure without you having to explain them.

You can't do any of what I described in Elements or Paint Shop Pro. Those programs are for putting Arnold Schwarzenegger's body on Maria Schrieber's body and stuff like that. I probably butchered the spellings of their names.

Anyway... 2 totally different animals.

With all the research and testing I've done while I've had my cold I may end up giving more info in this thread than I get but that's great by me.