In Part 1 of the series I showed you the different features of Picasa. Today I’m going to go in to the way I organize my photos, as well as share them. There is no real rule of how to organize. It really depends on what works best for you. If you have a system that works, great! If you need a system, here are some recommendations or suggestions.

In this day and age we take billions of photos and for the vast majority they are all digital. Back in the day when people still did print out their photos because they had to, we had albums to place the photos in order. Or it could be that the storage was done in sections in a box (similar to a shoe box, however preferably a nicer one) or in envelopes. And because the photographs, if not put away would be taking up physical space, it was more of a necessity to organize them.

The thinking has drastically changed from “work with what I have” to that of “I can go by more if need be”. Also the sheer numbers of photos is a bit overwhelming. In one night you may take hundreds of pictures. How do you organize and shift through them once and once only?

I have root folders listed by year. Then within each year, there are many events I go to or participate in, where I take pictures. I make a new folder for every event. So for example I went to Jane’s wedding on May 16, 2007; I’ll go in to the “2007” folder and create a new folder for the wedding. I’d name it in this convention: “MM-DD-YYYY – EventName” so the folder name would be “05-16-2007 – Jane’s Wedding”.

The next thing I do is open Picasa and run through all the pictures I have in that folder. Using the favorites or star button I mark all those pictures that I really like. I usually don’t delete photos but there are some that go directly to the trash; such as ones that are blurry or way too dark. Once I am done making my favorites, I can go back to the Picasa library and select all the favorites in that folder.

Once selected, right click and select “Move to New Folder”. I usually call the new folder the name of the original with the world album appended to it. In this case, my original folder was called “duvets”. I selected four favorites and moved them to a folder called “duvets album”.

Then right click on the new folder and select “Move Folder”. Move the folder in to the original folder. So the folder “duvets album” will move in to the folder “duvets”.

Now that I have my album folder I’m ready to share the pictures. There are various options nowadays. You can:

• simply upload to Picasa online from Picasa
• upload to Facebook or Flickr
• create a SimpleViewer album using Porta Photo Album generator
• or create an online album using ZenPhoto or Piwigo 

I personally don’t like uploading to social networking sites much and perfer to host my own albums. So I create an album with Porta Photo Album and can use SimpleViewer to view the photos or upload to Piwigo or ZenPhoto. Here is are some examples of albums.

• SimpleViewer album
• Piwigo albums
• ZenPhoto albums

I hope this has helped make the somewhat daunting task of organizing photos in to a manageable one.

What organizing tips do you have? I’d love to hear from you!

-ASH

How do you get the best out of your photos? I have a few tools that I use that make it easy to take my photos from ordinary to great. And in a series of posts, I’ll be telling you about them and how to use them.

(I guess I need to say right here that I have not been paid by any of these companies to say the following.)

The first tool is Picasa. It is a great photo editing tool. It is quick and easy for anyone to use.

You have the basic fixes that includes straightening out of a picture, cropping, correcting red eyes, auto contrast, auto color, and fill lighting. There is a separate tuning tab for more options.

Under the effects tab there are great features like:

• Sharpen – sharpen an image
• one button sepia and black and white
• Warmify – add some warmth to a picture
• Saturation – add or remove saturation
• Soft Focus – this is my favorite, add a blurred edge around your photos (great for removing unwanted backgrounds)
• Focal B&W – Make one part of the picture colored while the rest of the picture is black and white

I’ll show you an example of what you can do with Picasa. Here’s the original picture:

Isn’t this picture cute?! It was taken by my friend Jenn Walters.

After a series of changes made to the photo, you can have a great looking photo.

Here’s the final picture:

And then there are all the sharing options. If you have the Picasa online albums you photos can be uploaded to them easily. Or you can make a collage of the pictures in the album. You can even add captions to the pictures.

My favorite option is the star. I use this feature to make a concise album of all the million of pictures I take. As I go through an album, I just”star” a picture I like and then move all of the starred pictures into a sub folder.

There is a new feature in Picasa where you can tag people and then the program will use face recognition to tag new photos as they are added.

So I’ hope I’ve helped a little in editing your pictures.  Next will be organizing and sharing.

-ASH