Struggling to Manage Your Ever-Growing Digital Photo Collection?
Part 1 of 2
by John Grand

You know what I love the most about digital photography? I love that I can take as many pictures as I want without the nagging thought of film development costs going "ka-ching!" in the back of my mind with each snapshot. I no longer have to decide: "will this make a good picture?" Who cares, I just take it for now, and decide if I like it later. Now that is what I call photographic freedom!

This freedom that we enjoy with digital photography is not without consequence. At the risk of stating the obvious, less hesitation leads to a lot more photos! With film cameras, unsorted pictures ended up in a shoebox (or, in my case, unceremoniously dumped in a large filing cabinet drawer - a failed attempt at conveying a sense of order). With digital cameras, unsorted photos get sprinkled all over your computer disks. Combined with the fact that we take a lot more digital photos than we used to take with our 35 mm, we end up with one huge mess instead of a photo collection.

Here are some of the unique challenges that we face with digital photography:

1) Organization

This is the first, and most obvious, problem that we run into. We've taken all these photos, and now what? Where do we put them? If you were fortunate enough to think of organization from the start, then you might have created a folder on your computer disk called "pictures" and dumped them all in there. That's one step ahead of a lot of people who have image files spread out all over the place. Sometimes we rely on software to put files in the right place, but the problem is that we use many software packages as sources of photos. We use one software package to extract photos from our digital camera. We receive some photos by email. We grab photos from the internet, from Word documents, etc. Each of these programs puts the photos in different places. The end result is that we often can't find the photo we're searching for. Even worse, we lose some photos somewhere on the computer and forget all about them.

2) Presentation

With film photography, we regularly create photo albums to show friends and family. Inviting people over to watch us search for, and double-click, each of our image files pales by comparison.

3) Safety

With film photography, our photos were safe as long as nothing catastrophic happened like our house burned down. Our digital photos are a lot more vulnerable to being lost altogether. Computer disk crashes, while relatively rare, are still much more likely to occur then a house burning down. But that's not the only thing that we need to worry about. Someone could accidentally, and so easily, slip a folder that contained photos into the trash bin. Or our computer could get infected with a malicious virus that erases files.

4) Security

When we show our developed photos to someone, they only get to see the photos that we hand over to them. And the developed photos we showed were behind a plastic sheet in an album, which offered basic protection from spills or children with sticky fingers. In the digital world, how do we protect our photos? Anyone on the computer can root through all of the pictures, move them, rename them, and even delete them. Sticky finger problems have been replaced with the more devastating delete key problem.

Fortunately, there are software solutions that address some or all of these issues. A must for digital camera enthusiasts is a digital photo album software package. If you think you don't have time to use software to organize your digital photos, the opposite is more likely to be true: you are too busy to do without digital photo album software! The amount of time you will waste searching for photos is much greater than the small learning curve needed to master the basics of a good software package. And once you have the basics, that's when the software really starts to pay off in time savings.

There are many software packages out there for you to choose from, and most of them will satisfy your basic needs. You can usually try them out for free, and you should. Software that is right for one person may not be the best solution for someone else. Once the basics are covered, it comes down to personal preference. Which do you find easy to use? Which one offers added little features that you want to take advantage of? What will you be doing with your photo collection? Keep asking yourself these questions as you evaluate various software products.

Let's take a look at how digital photo album software can solve all the issues raised earlier.

See Part - 2

About the Author:
John Grand is the creative force behind Photo SafeStore, the revolutionary award-winning digital photo album software. John has over twenty years of experience in the software industry. Photo SafeStore represents a technological breakthrough in digital photo album software that merges the complexity of image handling with databases. The result is a product like no other: www.photosafestore.com

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