Day 7: ORGANIZE YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOS IN JUST 15 MINUTES IN 15 DAYS IN 2015 (#15in15in2015)

To carry on our story-saving, memory-preserving caption-writing efforts of yesterday, we’re going to learn about keywords, also known as tags, which are helpful facts that will give your photos an added level of organization by making them easily searchable.

JUST GOOGLE IT
Think about how you simply go to Google and type in whatever words are in your brain to describe the topic you seek. Those word choices are “search terms” that are essentially metadata. Imagine if you could Google “Paul’s 4^th birthday” and it would magically find all those photos in an instant and show them to you. That would be pretty awesome, right? Well, guess what? We’re going to do that process for your pictures so you can type in some basic terms/keywords/tags and let Picasa be your Google to pull the pics with those matching words. Woohoo!

Now just to clarify for you security-scaredy-cat folks, your photo metadata CANNOT really be read by Google or any other search engines. I’m merely pointing out that it works in a similar fashion to a search engine, but this searching is all done on your own computer to find your own photo files!

Maybe I should’ve used the example of a stock photo website instead. It allows you to search for specific terms to find the perfect image from its vast gallery. Without those search terms (keywords) tagged to the images, they won’t be easily found.

If you’ve looked at a stock photo site, click on an image and check out the keyword list. I’m sure you’ll find a few that don’t seem like words you’d use to describe that photo, but that’s why the success of keywording partially depends on thinking like the person who will be searching. Great news if it’s going to be you most of the time! You know you best!

METADATA MANIA
What in the world is metadata and why must I learn another tech term? Metadata is hidden information attached to every image file that provides additional details for your reference. Why on earth do I care, you ask?

In addition to the image data of your JPG, each image also contains technical information from the camera that captured it. Facts about the camera model, date/time, lens, aperture, ISO, flash, and location (if geo-tag enabled) are recorded to an EXIF file that always stays with the image. You can usually view this info by clicking the “get info” or “properties” menu for any photo, although it’s not often editable.

Commonly called “keywords” or “tags,” metadata is “hidden” data that is tied to your JPG, adding helpful information that can be used to find a specific photo when searching. Obviously, the camera does its job and auto-generates the “capture” specifications and the “when” with the date/time (if your camera is set properly!). But you’ll need to fill in the other blanks about who, what, where and why.

The computer allows us to add these fields of keywords to any image. In addition to the camera’s EXIF, two other types you can add with a computer are called IPTC from the 1970s and the newer style XMP developed by Adobe in 2001. These include geographic location, copyright notice, creator, contact info, and of course, captions, among other details.

People tend to prefer the word “tags” because it makes you think of price tags or gift tags that are attached to items and give you helpful information such as “This is THAT much?” or “That’s for me?”

In today’s social media-savvy world, we could also think of them a bit like #hashtags, which are primarily found on Instagram and Twitter. If you don’t understand those, don’t stress as this isn’t about that but it may help some of you get a grip on what tags are and why we do it.

Web designers use keywords when creating sites to improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Maybe we should call what we’re doing Photo Recall Optimization (PRO)? I know I’d like to be a PRO at it! And with Picasa’s tags and captions, I can be!

TAG, YOU’RE IT
Picasa makes it super easy to add tags to any photo. Just click on the small yellow “tag” icon in the lower right corner of a photo in the editor mode. The right panel now becomes a tag editor window. Type in your words and hit “enter” to have them saved. If you need to delete a tag, click on it to highlight it, then click the small x at the far right.

You can also set up to 10 “quick tags” that you use the most by clicking the tiny orange “gear” logo in that section. These stay at the bottom so you can simply click once to include them without typing anything again. To save you time, the top two spots are reserved for your most-recent tags, unless you opt otherwise.

To be honest, this is one area of Picasa that I think is lacking. The irony of that fact is that Picasa is from Google, THE search engine king! I’d love to see better use of Picasa’s Tags panel by showing more of my tags so I can just click them to apply, or maybe have an alphabetical auto-fill so as I start to type, my choices are filled in fast. And I’d also prefer to have a way to sort them into a hierarchy with categories or grouped by sub-topics such as People, Places, and so on.

Adobe Lightroom offers more advanced tagging features like this. Because I can’t get this level of sorting from my tags in Picasa, I have to be smart about which ones I choose and make sure my captions are complete so they can serve as useful search terms too.

WHAT2TAG
But what, you ask, am I supposed to put down for tags? Good question. There isn’t a right or wrong answer, per se. It’s more of a matter of thinking about how you think. Or more importantly, how you’ll think in the future. Or how you think your loved ones might think.

Before you start typing in text willy-nilly, think for a few minutes about the words you would use to jog your memory when you want to find a photo. Scroll through your photo collection in Picasa for visual cues to start making a list in your head. If you want, you can jot a few notes down on paper but the idea is to get your brain in the right frame of mind.

Remember how we used the 4Ws of Who, What, Where and When when writing captions? These still apply for tags too! Except you don’t have to write full sentences or use punctuation. (If you didn’t, don’t freak out as there is no technical rule regarding this.)

WHODUNNIT
Looking at the WHO category, or PEOPLE for tagging…there are a few key groups such as family, friends, and don’t forget your pets! Family should be specified by first name, although I also suggest using their “title” as well, especially if you have more than one person sharing that name, i.e. grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, son, daughter.

FACE OFF
One fun feature of Picasa (& some other photo managers) is its facial recognition capability that learns and automatically labels faces for who they are! This can reduce the need to have name tags. We will cover this in our next post!

WHATCHA DOIN
This may be one of the biggest, broadest categories of all because it includes the EVENTS like holidays, birthdays, vacations, weddings, and reunions, as well as ACTIVITIES such as camping, swimming, cooking, horseback-riding, bike-riding, etc. As you can see, if you participate in two similar-sounding but vastly different activities, you’ll want to separate them into specific tags. Instead of just using “riding” by itself, you should clarify the type of riding — “horseback-riding” or “bike-riding” or “motorcycle-riding.” Of course, you could still just use “riding” by itself if you also added the other word by itself too — horseback, bike and motorcycle could be search terms. It should work to combine searches such as “bike + riding,” which should give you any pics that match both bike AND riding. Imagine all the verbs you can “do.”

I love this shot of my son bawling from August 2010! You may think that’s odd to say, but if you’re like me, 100% of your photos are of smiling/happy people. Capturing a different emotion (sadness, anger, tantrums, etc. that are typical at the age of 5) gives a unique perspective of reality. And this is all because I wouldn’t let him bring the toad (that’s barely seen inside his hands) home with us to become a pet. Mean Mom! [Click for larger view]

SMILING OR CRYING
For most candid camera shots, the people in the photo are likely smiling as we’ve all learned to “say cheese” and “smile for the camera” since childhood. I know there are digital cameras on the market that can detect when everyone in a group is smiling so it snaps the pic real quick. As much as we adore beautiful smiles, chances are that 90% of your photos are of smiling people. Maybe more!

What we don’t usually photograph though is our kids having meltdown moments, tantrums, bawlfests and crybaby sessions. Yet that may be the one shot we’d like to find someday. If you put “smiling” in as a tag, you have a zillion more to tag, and it’s hard to find that special shot someday later. But if you put “crying” or “frowning” as the tag on those few photos, you’d be all set for quickly finding them for the ultimate embarrassment when the perfect time comes.

That said, a pro photographer told a story that he DOES tag his senior portraits as “smiling” because most Moms want a pic of their child smiling and this photog didn’t want to look through the photo shoot to find the few with good smiles. So maybe it’s not such a crazy idea, but for my own use, I’m going to stick to the NON-smiling tags.

DAWN OF A NEW AGE
That’s right. This is the dawn of a new age — the age of organized digital photos! Don’t stacks of older print feel rather prehistoric right now after all this tech talk for a week? Age is an important factor for many of us as Moms trying to sort out our kids’ childhoods.

One helpful idea is to have digital photos tagged as baby, toddler, preschool, elementary, middle-school, high-school, and college. Suppose you wanted to add another level of detail like first-grade, hs-sophomore, college-senior, etc. Just make sure you don’t overlap “senior” to mean the one in high school, college or the old folks! Be more detailed for early childhood with 0-3months, 3-6months, 6-9months, 9-12months, and 1year.

Other than the age of the person in the photo, you could also “age” your time period to a certain decade: 40s, 60s, 80s. But the photo folder date will already be able to give you that information so I don’t think this would be a very helpful tag choice.

TIME WILL TELL
You may wish to add a tag to describe the relative time of day the photo was taken too. Although I think this could become overkill in a hurry if you listed day/night or am/pm or morning/evening/noon. I can see the point for sunrise and sunset though as sometimes you want to find a specific shot for that. But these aren’t as critical as the other tags so only do this if you can justify that it matters to you and your future searching ability. I won’t ask for proof but you’ll know best.

WHERERU
The 4th W of Where would be the PLACE tag. Of course, you can label the locations of your photos in Picasa’s tag editor. There are so many places you may want to include in your list though — home, school, work, church, park, backyard and restaurant usually apply to all of us. Then there’s the zoo, park, daycare, farm, starbucks, ocean, beach, cruise, disney, vegas, etc. You will have to determine how many of these you intend to include and it really only matters if you would ever possibly want to search for the photo by that term or sort these matching photos into a new group.

For example, say you go to a certain spot several times on different occasions. Yet you’d like to maybe see ALL your photos from that place in one group. If that’s the case, you’d better make it a tag.

GEOTAG = METADATA MAP
On that same topic, there’s another field of metadata for location information that can be as specific as latitude and longitude coordinates, or just search for it on a Google map to have it tied to your photos that were taken there.

If you travel, it can be fascinating to see your photos on a map. If you don’t leave the state much, you can probably skip this step! But seriously folks, get outta Dodge once! There’s a whole wide world out there waiting to be explored — and photographed!

Adding a geotag is also easy in Picasa. With one or more photos selected, click on the small red thumbtack “place” icon to load the Places Panel. From there you can search for an address or simply click on the map to place the dot. It will ask you if you’d like to place the photo(s) there. You can click yes to confirm, no to cancel or move the pinpoint as needed. The fastest way is to select multiples, of course.

GENERIC SEARCH TERMS
Depending on what types of photos exist in your collection and what you intend to do with them, you may find it helpful to include other generic search terms such as: landscape, scenery, nature, landscape (just make sure it refers to photos of the terrain; not all horizontal photos!), and portrait (close-up photo of a person not all vertical photos!). If you tend to take a lot of food & drink photos for Instagram, maybe you should have separate “food” and “drink” tags, although I’m guessing you could group these together as “food & drink” too.

SPECIFIC SEARCH TERMS
Now you’ll need to think about your life and photos specifically. What words are common in your family that might be useful for searching/sorting later? If your child likes to make Lego creations like mine did, you may have quite a few photos of various structures and playtime. In that case, adding the tag “Lego” might prove wise if you’d like to just search to pull up all Lego photos someday.

What about weather? Depending on where you live, you may want to add a term or two. For example, living in Vegas, where it rarely rains or snows, I would be able to tag select photos with “rain” or “snow.” But it would be ridiculous to tag all the rest “sunny” since there are so many of those! Although maybe folks in Seattle would say the opposite — they’ll tag “sunny” because it’s more rare and leave “rainy” as a regular term.

If you take quite a few pics of fireworks, the moon, clouds or whatever you “obsession” seems to be, definitely make a tag for it and use it consistently in the future too.

INHERENT INFO
In Picasa, the far right column can become a panel of information for PEOPLE/FACES (mug shot icon), PLACES/MAPS (red thumbtack icon), TAGS/KEYWORDS (yellow tag icon), and PROPERTIES/INFO (i in blue circle). Just click through these to see various dates and details that are part of your photos metadata. The last panel for Properties will give you a long list of info you probably didn’t know even existed on every image, even ones shot by your smartphone camera!

DAY 7: 2/5/15: 15 MINUTES. METATAG MARVEL.

Set your phone’s timer or stopwatch for 15 minutes and open Picasa. Navigate to your most-recent photo month/event folder. While viewing the thumbnails in the Library view, select multiple photos* that will have the same batch of basic keywords. Usually you can apply most of the tags to the whole group of pics, and then specify further details from there. This makes it quite easy to add the keywords to all those photos without doing it individually for each one!

*How to select multiple files at once: MAC: Click & hold down the SHIFT key, then click on the first item in the list so it’s highlighted. Now go to the last item of the group (all in a row), you’d like to pick & click that one. Every image in between the two you clicked on is now highlighted.

A good example would be a grouping of vacation pictures. They can all be tagged “vacation” and maybe “travel” and possibly “springbreak” or “summer,” depending when you went. Add in a location tag of whatever state you visited at least; city too if it’s major enough you might sort by that term someday. You’ll then want to mark them with whatever other terms you might want to find later: mountain, tree, sunset, red (colors), purple dress (fashion), sailing (activity), etc.

TAGGING TIPS: 

• Use only singular words whenever possible. (mountain, tree, birthday — not mountains, trees, birthdays)
• Remember (or write down) a list of the words you choose for consistency
• Only use lowercase unless it’s a proper city/state or name
• Save specific locations for geotag (Places) 
• Use facial recognition for People & turn on Name Tags feature for your photos with faces

In summary, your DAY 7 DUTIES:

1. OPEN PICASA & VIEW YOUR MOST-RECENT PHOTO FOLDER (2015-01) IN THE LIBRARY. 
2. SELECT THE LARGEST BATCH OF MULTIPLE PHOTOS THAT YOU CAN APPLY MANY OF THE SAME TAGS.
3. CLICK THE SMALL YELLOW TAG ICON TO OPEN THE TAG PANEL.
4. WRITE YOUR TAGS & SAVE THEM TO YOUR PHOTOS.
5. SAVE SOME “QUICK TAGS” TO SPEED UP YOUR TAGGIN.
6. GO BACK THROUGH ALL PHOTOS (START WITH STARS). TRY TO KEEP TAGGING ALL 2015 PHOTOS AS YOU IMPORT OR DURING THE EDITING PHASE WHEN YOU CAPTION.

WHOA WARNING
Places (Geotags) & People (Faces) can be handled separately in Picasa if you prefer. Decide whether you’ll use the distinct metadata features for this information or whether you want it all to be in the same tags/keywords field. Personally, I’d use the options that the software allows wherever possible. These are far more visually appealing and offer additional search capability than the standard text-only tags.

TALKING TIME LIMITS
Not gonna lie. This can take a while. If you get carried away tagging, this may suck you in. Don’t let it. Remember, this step is NOT the most important. If you’ve sorted your photos into the well-named folders and captioned your photos with searchable words, you already miles ahead when it comes to finding the photos you want faster in the future. Do a few tags for what you think might be helpful and let it go. You can always come back to tagging at a later date if you feel the urge. If you do, just remember to sync or update your backups so those images have the tags you added.

© Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

DAY 6: ORGANIZE YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOS IN JUST 15 MINUTES IN 15 DAYS IN 2015 (#15IN15IN2015)

1000 WORDS
A photo is worth a thousand words. We all know that famous quote yet do we really believe it and accept it as truth? Does that mean we don’t need to write down anything about our pictures because we’ll just “know.”

What’s Your Story? Do your photos tell 1000 words? Or do you need to write maybe 10 to leave a lasting memory?

We’d love to think we’ll always remember everything down to every last detail. Yet the older we get, the more the reality of fading and forgotten memories makes us realize writing down a few details might be a better way to preserve the stories behind the photos.

We shouldn’t feel bad about this fact. I mean really, most of us depend on to-do lists and grocery lists without scoffing at one another for a lack of brainpower. So why should we feel inadequate somehow for writing down a few words about our photos? Just. In. Case.

As anyone who has lost a loved one too soon, or endured a family member suffering with Alzheimer’s or dementia, you just never know “when” will be too late to ask about “the time when” or “tell me about this picture” or “who is this?”

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 “Safeguard your yesterdays for tomorrow by capturing your present today.”
~ Brenda Kruse, PhotoOrganizingPro.com

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By recording the seemingly simple and small details of your daily life now, you’re making it much easier on yourself — and your legacy (future generations) — to know why you took that particular photo, why you kept it, and why it mattered so much.

The secret to all that? Words, or the story.

And don’t instantly get your feathers ruffled, underwear in a bunch, ire up…by whining “but Brenda, I’m not a writer, I can’t write, I’m not good at words, I don’t know what to say,” etc. excuses. I say, “baloney!”

WRITE ON
No one is asking (or expecting) you to write the next best-selling novel. Or viral blog post. Maybe you’ll be the only person who ever reads it anyway. The point is to put something down on “paper.” Well, I don’t actually mean paper or print, I mean as a digital CAPTION that becomes metadata that stays with your image file. Read this (I am a writer!) and repeat it until you believe it!

In Picasa (my preferred photo management program & hopefully now yours as well), captions are easy to create. Simply click in the space below the photo and type what you want. It auto-saves as you either click enter or move to the next pic. The best part is that every word is searchable so you’ve just made it easier to find the photo (like keyword/tags, which we’ll cover tomorrow). And all this VIP info is stored with the image itself, meaning it will export and transfer to any other program as needed.

Captions can be printed when you print the photo (not straight-forward but there are ways). They also appear in slideshows on Google+ (or you can turn them off). They can display with your photos when uploaded to Web Albums too. You can also turn them on in the Library view to show below the thumbnails.

PRIORITIZE PICS
Typing up even a simple caption may seem time-consuming when facing a backlog of your entire photo collection but I recommend you start from today and start with the stars! In other words, view your “all stars” and look at the most-recent photos first. Add captions there as you see fit. If you never get around to captioning your “other” photos, at least you’ve done your all-time favorites. Those are the ones you said mean the most to you anyway so those should be your first for saving the story.

“Put on your own oxygen mask first before assisting anyone else.” ~ Flight Attendant

This reminds me of what the flight attendants say on a plane in the case of an emergency and the oxygen mask drops from the ceiling compartment, put yours on first before assisting a child or anyone else. So these are your ultimate “me” photos…your oxygen mask moments.

Then you can move on to doing the others. And yes, you can copy and paste one caption to others, although this isn’t the ideal way to provide information. If you simply need to identify basic facts, the keywords/tags feature will likely be more appropriate. We’re covering that tomorrow so maybe wait and see on some of your “Disneyland Spring Break 2012” captions you thought you’d type. Instead, tell us about the tantrum your son threw when he couldn’t get the light saber sucker or how your daughter turned green after riding Mickey’s Fun Wheel or how long you waited for the Cars ride.

NOT JUST THE FACTS, MA’AM
When I say write captions, I mean more of the background story or an interesting tidbit about the moment that isn’t obvious from the visual. Not just some of the more literal things we can deduce from either seeing the photo or knowing which file folder it came from with its date and event label.

In other words, don’t bother putting a caption of “zoo sign” on a photo of a sign at the front of a zoo you visited. I’m pretty sure your future offspring should be able to figure that out without your “helpful” hint. One you way you should plan to help them is to explain why you went to the zoo. School field trip, vacation, local excursion, your kid wouldn’t stop talking about polar bears one summer, or whatever it is. You’ll be able to use metadata keywords and geotags to identify the location and other specifics so that won’t be needed in your caption although you could add it now as long as you include the additional details as well — not just the facts, ma’am!

TELLING A STORY “DOWN THE LINE”
Consider the old-time game of “telephone” for a minute. I’m too young to have ever played it but am familiar with the concept. You tell one person a story and then that person calls another person to tell them what you said. Keep the chain going and then see if the story even resembles the original when it’s told back to the original author! Kinda like gossip!

Same goes for your photos and the stories behind them. One person might tell the story one way; another leaves out one detail and adds in two more. Someone else might go off on a tangent about another aspect that’s not really related to this photo but reminds them of this other story. See what I mean? This is why you need to write down the stories and memories YOU want to save and share as captions. Even if they end up being little blurbs for the most part, they will add a little extra information, personality, character, and point-of-view to the photo.

Remember the old print photos of our past that we all have (or have inherited)? The ones when past generations actually wrote on the backs of photo prints? That little detail or description is now a cherished caption as it tells us what, many times, the people pictured cannot as they are no longer with us.

Of course, those hand-written captions were a little more awesome because they were just that — hand-written snippets of their signature style that we now treasure. Sadly, your Picasa captions will not give future generations that same warm-fuzzy feeling but they’ll be grateful you wrote anything at all!

What story does the above photo tell? Besides it’s the 70s?! Bet you’re not sure. Luckily the back had this CAPTION (in my Mom’s handwriting): “Brenda & Shane are taking lessons from Steve on how to make funny faces. February or March 1974.” That means I was a little over 2 years old sitting on the kitchen table with my slightly younger cousin while my dad made us laugh by making funny faces, probably after he came in from doing chores at night. This is from the old farmhouse in NW IA. 

Enough lecture on why it’s so important and why you need to stop complaining and just start typing. Turn on your 15-minute timer and crank out some captions! You can always go back to edit or embellish later. Get something down for each “starred” favorite photo in your collection and you’ll be so thankful someday. You can send me a nice note then.

DAY 6: 2/4/15: 15 MINUTES. CAPTAIN CAPTION

Set your phone’s timer or stopwatch for 15 minutes and open Picasa. Click on the top filter to “show starred photos only” then look at your most-recent photo folder (probably 2015-01). These will be easier to caption because they are most fresh in your mind.

In the library, double-click to open the first one in the editing mode. Underneath it, click the “Make a caption!” text and type in your own. Click enter to see it “saved” on that photo or just hit the next arrow at the top to advance to the next starred photo in the folder.

As you go back in time through your collection, you will realize it’s more difficult to remember the specifics and the stories that go with some older photos. Those memories are already fading! Write what you can and if possible, jot a note in it to ask another person to share their story about the photo. This works for a spouse, child, sibling or someone else who was also there at that time or maybe remembers the stories you once told about this photo. Sharing your stories verbally is important but putting them in print is priceless. I’ll be showing some great options for taking “the next steps” with your photos for sharing and saving them!

In summary, your DAY 6 DUTIES:

1. OPEN PICASA & FILTER BY “ALL STARS,” THEN START WITH YOUR MOST-RECENT PHOTO FOLDER (2015-01).
2. DOUBLE-CLICK THE FIRST PIC TO OPEN IT IN THE EDITOR.
3. UNDERNEATH THE PHOTO, WRITE YOUR OWN TEXT IN THE “MAKE A CAPTION!” SPACE AND CLICK ENTER WHEN DONE.
4. CLICK THE FORWARD ARROW AT THE TOP CENTER TO ADVANCE TO THE NEXT STARRED PHOTO AND REPEAT THIS PROCESS UNTIL ALL YOUR FAVORITE PHOTOS HAVE BEEN CAPTIONED.
5. IF YOU HAD FUN WITH THAT AND WANT TO KEEP WORKING, FEEL FREE TO OPEN YOUR MOST-RECENT FOLDER (2015-01), CLICK “VIEW ALL” AND ADD CAPTIONS TO ALL YOUR OTHER PHOTOS. WORK BACK TO DO THEM ALL IF YOU CHOOSE.

WHOA WARNING
By their original intent, captions were designed to be relatively brief, extending about the length/width of your photo (if horizontal). Think about how captions provide details next to photos in articles found in newspapers and magazines. These “cutlines” sometimes simply summarize; others they offer unique details specific to the image shown. Picasa will allow longer text and simply continues your text onto another line (or more) so feel free to write out the story as you wish without editing it to fit a certain limit. I wouldn’t worry much about a caption that takes up two lines. That said, you would not be able to print a long-copy caption on the photo very easily and it may not display well on slideshows and mobile devices, but the point is to preserve the information along with the image first and foremost. Write on!

TALKING TIME LIMITS
Captions shouldn’t take long to type up unless you are a hunt-and-pack typist. If you are, maybe it’d be more efficient to have someone faster type while you speak what you want instead. It’s up to you but if you know someone who would make a great teammate for this process, ask for their assistance. In all reality, it really doesn’t matter much if your captions have poor grammar or typos in them so don’t stress about being graded. The only thing that might give you a little grief would be a typo in a caption if you tried to search for that word because Picasa wouldn’t include in its search results the photo with the misspelled word in the caption. Remember, spelling cownts.

© Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

DAY 5: ORGANIZE YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOS IN JUST 15 MINUTES IN 15 DAYS IN 2015 (#15IN15IN2015)

Who feels more organized already? You should’ve spent an hour (at least!) on these past four daily tasks so far. Much less than you probably spend watching The Bachelor’s Monday night marathons! And you know for a fact that your time spent dealing with your digital photos is far more useful than watching some dude try to date 15 crazy chicks. After today’s 15-minute session, you’ll be one-third of the way to our grand finale for Valentine’s Day!

PUSH CAME TO SHOVE
Well I let you make it to Day 5 before I asked you what team you were on — PC or MAC. Not that it really matters though, as photo management is a universally compatible problem. But today you’ll be making the official decision of what software program, if any, you are going to use to manage your images. I realize this is a touchy subject and there’s no way to please all of you so please don’t start a fight over this topic in the comments.

Much of it comes down to personal preference and the sheer fact that — whatever you pick — you must use it! Regularly & religiously! If you don’t have a favorite program yet or are willing to explore options, I’ll make recommendations you are welcome to try. But don’t just throw in the towel if you aren’t savvy with a certain photo program I mention. If you already know what you prefer to use, fantastic! Simply use my advice to apply the information to your specific software and all will be well!

AN APPLE A DAY
Here we go down the road of discussing loyalties a bit. I’m a diehard Mac lover and have been since an early age. I own a couple 17-inch MacBook Pro laptops that are older and well-used but have served me well. However, I also own a cheap PC laptop that I use to run my high-speed scanning equipment. And over the years, I’ve had to work on PCs for clients as well. Two years ago, I finally got on the iPhone bandwagon with a 5 and just recently upped the ante with the 6+. Somewhat surprisingly to some, I do not currently own any iPads or tablets so I can’t answer any questions purely specific to those although most of what we’re doing will universally apply to all devices.

ALWAYS ADOBE
First of all, there are image viewers that primarily show you the photo files but don’t often have editing tools or other advanced features. You’ve probably been using an image viewer these past few days. There are two other types of photo software you may have used, or have thought about trying out.

Of course, the number one name when people think of when it comes to photo software is often Adobe Photoshop, which is a high-end photo-editing (manipulation depending how far you take it!) program — NOT a photo management system. Adobe Lightroom is a DAM program. DAM stands for Digital Asset Management — I wasn’t cursing at you! A database-driven photo manager usually offers some degree of editing along with the ability to create, edit and access image metadata, the helpful extra information that stays connected with your photo.

Lightroom is available as boxed software or a digital download for about $150. You can also use its Creative Cloud monthly subscription method to get BOTH Photoshop & Lightroom for only $9.99/month, which is a pretty good deal. But not if you’re never going to learn them as they do have pretty steep learning curves. If you shoot RAW, you’ll want to use Lightroom. (If you think “shooting raw” means you take pictures of carrots, stick with Picasa.) It also offers a more advanced editing palette and additional metadata capability. So if you’re a pro (or a wanna-be pro), you may want to make this leap. If you’re a novice, amateur, beginner, hobbyist or just plain normal person looking for something that won’t require a college degree to master, keep reading…

PICASA FOR ME
Personally and professionally, I pick Picasa for organizing, editing and sharing your photos. Now closely integrated with Google, this free Mac & PC software links well with Google+, Gmail and other Google apps if you are already connected. However, you do not need to have fully explored the Google+ realm to use Picasa. The latest version (3.9) can be downloaded here (http://picasa.google.com/).

Picasa Web Albums are perfect for uploading photos to the cloud for sharing and saving as a backup. Storage is easy enough to manage for archiving and I love that it syncs so if I go back to edit a photo, it will upload the changed version so my online copy stays current without me having to do anything!

The nice thing about Picasa is that it doesn’t store your photos inside the program. It simply displays the ones you tell it to find by searching specific folders on your computer. Of course, you simply need to tell it to look in the PICTURES folder as you just put everything there in nicely organized fashion! Woohoo!

Another cool point is that when you edit a photo in Picasa, your original file stays safe. You can make all the edits you want but they won’t save until you say so. Even then, Picasa makes a new version of the edited photo, leaving the original safe. It knows that many of us tend to get carried away with editing and can’t “undo” enough to start over. So it saves our butt for us automatically. Gotta love that!

WHY NOT IPHOTO
Well, I never really liked how iPhoto seemed to hold my actual photo files hostage in its hidden libraries, among other hiccups, and that led me to migrate to Picasa several years ago and I’ve never looked back.

Now with Apple announcing last summer that it will soon retire iPhoto, I’m even more thrilled with my decision! By the way, Apple also killed off Aperture, the more-pro version meant to battle Adobe’s Lightroom. Both prior Apple photo programs will become the sometime-to-be-released Photos for Mac (the world’s lamest name for a product if you ask me). The promise for an “early 2015” release, which some estimate to be by April, but the latest scoop is questioning even that deadline now.

If you have been using iPhoto and feel confident about it, fantastic! Or if you still want it no matter what I say, then click the app logo to download it now. I wish you luck! When Photos is officially released, I’m sure it will be designed to seamlessly transition your images (and all their metadata) into the new software. So you can choose to wait and see what it’s like or make the move to something else now. Your call. But whatever work you do should be safe if you make the conversion to a system that accepts your current software’s metadata files. Not to scare you, but that’s the key!

If you’re using a different software program that does not play well with others, all your hard work could be wasted if the tags, captions, keywords and such are only specific to that software and will not “stay” with your image when it is exported. Do a little research to ensure that your metadata would make the move too!

I DON’T DO WINDOWS
I did confess I had a PC laptop for my scanners but I only use it as a tool to run the machines. Once the images are scanned, I copy them onto a USB flash drive and plug it into my Macs for importing into Picasa where I go from there. However, I realize that there are probably a few of you PC people who want a Windows solution.

Your “iPhoto” option — as in free, included with every computer — is Windows (Live) Photo Gallery. It will do almost anything Picasa does I’m sure. But again, if there’s a free PC-compatible software program designed specifically for photo management, why wouldn’t you try it? Picasa also works well in households with computers (or phones or tablets) on both platforms as it’s universal. Learn one and everyone is on the same page.

YOUR FAVORITE STARS
So now that I shared with you my favorite photo management program, I want you to download it (100% free), follow the simple directions to let it load all your images from your PHOTOS folder. It will show all your nicely labeled & organized year, month & event sub-folders for easy reference.

Then you get to have fun picking YOUR favorites! One cool feature in Picasa (there are many so I may say that often in the next 10 days) is that you can simply STAR a photo as a favorite. You can do this a couple ways from inside Picasa. One by one: as you are viewing a full-size photo, click the star underneath it to apply the “star” favorite tag. Multiples: Shift-select several thumbnails in a folder & then click the star to include them all as favorites.

Why bother you ask? I’ll show you why. At the top center, you’ll see a filters menu that starts with a tiny star. Click it once to “show starred photos only.” It sorts out your faves so you can see (& share) just the ones you love the most. This way you don’t have to delete the others, or copy or paste them into new folders, or anything complicated. Just click “star” & click “view only stars” to narrow it down to the best of the best!

You may think you’d prefer to rank your photos on a numerical scale or a 1 to 5 stars so you can gauge them along a sliding scale. Other programs offer this option and it’s really your choice but for me, it’s an added level of decision complexity. Because if you really think about it, are you going to keep the photos that you would mark as 1s or even 2s? You shouldn’t! Just delete them right on the spot! I doubt you’ll miss them because you really don’t love them enough. It’s okay. They don’t mind.

If you would give your photo 5 stars, it gets a star. If your photos are borderline 3 or 4 stars, they should just stay in the folder as is. They are your “supporting” cast of actors; not the leading stars. It’s that easy.

If you had to try to pick a number between 2, 3 or 4, chances are you’d spend too much time debating it in your head than it needs. And then you’d dread doing this process in the first place. So you’d stop. Not good. That’s why I’m a fan of either YES (star), OK (supporting) or NO (delete). Simple. Gut instinct. Go!

I’m not sure if you had more fun clicking through your pics to hit DELETE or if you’ll enjoy clicking to STAR them instead, I suppose it depends on your personality or mood. I’d assume more happy & positive people prefer the STAR process, and those feeling grumpy or revengeful might get a little satisfaction from hitting DELETE.

Now if you are just reading all of my how-to posts before you actually do any of them, I suppose you could TRY to combine both DELETE & STAR tasks into one step. Although I don’t believe you will work as fast because your brain will be trying to think on extreme opposite ends of the spectrum — finding the very best AND very worst. It might be more productive to give your full focus to either deleting the duds or starring the favorites.

DAY 5: 2/3/15: 15 MINUTES. YOU’RE A STAR! FIND YOUR FAVES!

Set your phone’s timer or stopwatch for 15 minutes and download Picasa to your main computer. Follow the simple instructions to set it up and have it find the photos in your main PHOTOS folder. Once it’s done with that (don’t count this as part of your 15 minutes), open your 2015-01 photo folder (& any event sub-folders if you have them) to view the pics. You can control the size of the thumbnails by using the slider at the bottom right. Or you can double-click to view it at full-size.

Decide if it’s a STAR or not. If so, click the small white star under the photo. It will turn YELLOW!  If you change your mind, simply click it again. White is off. Yellow is on. Use the arrow key at the top center to click to the next photo in your folder and keep moving through your photos this way. No need to spend time now doing any editing, tagging or captions…all that will come in due time…starting tomorrow!

If you don’t need to see them full-size, you can click the STAR to any selected photo in the thumbnail library viewer as well. Should you need to save time and STAR several photos at once, you can select the first one you want, hold down the SHIFT key and click on the last one you want which selects everything in between those two photos. Now when you click star, all of them will be favorited. A more useful shortcut may be the Shift-CMD (MAC) that allows you to select several specific photos that are not all in a row.

Go through as many of your photo folders as you can, working backward in time. There are no rules for how many STARS you can have in a folder, but you should not have all photos be stars! Be a little selective your first time through. Try to choose your best ones that matter the most.

Think about it like this…you’re in an elevator and you want to show someone your favorite photos from this certain folder. You don’t have a lot of time. Which ones do you pick? Now it doesn’t have to be just 3 or even 10 if it’s a folder of 100 photos but it should be a significantly smaller percentage of the total. I don’t want to give you any hard, fast numbers to follow because it’s not about that. It’s about choosing the best photos you love and the ones that best represent an event or moment that you captured in your life. That’s what matters more.

Obviously, as you’re doing this STAR process, if you find a photo (or 2 or 10) that you maybe missed during your DELETION day yesterday, feel free to handle it now. Don’t save it another second! Get rid of it! You can either right-click to choose “delete from disk” or find that option under the FILE menu. But deal with it now while you’re here and have your mind made up.

In summary, your DAY 5 DUTIES:

1. DOWNLOAD PICASA & INSTALL IT FOLLOWING THE SIMPLE STEPS.
2. HAVE IT FIND YOUR PHOTOS INSIDE THE MAIN “PHOTOS” FOLDER WHERE YOU JUST ORGANIZED THEM BY YEAR-MO FOLDERS (& EVENT SUB-FOLDERS IN SOME CASES).
3. OPEN YOUR MOST RECENT PHOTO FOLDER & VIEW THE IMAGES WHILE DECIDING WHICH ONES EARN A STAR (FAVORITE) DESIGNATION.
4. MOVE QUICKLY & WORK BACKWARD IN TIME THROUGH ALL YOUR PHOTOS UNTIL YOU’VE CREATED AN INITIAL HIGHLIGHT REEL OF YOUR WHOLE COLLECTION.
5. REWARD YOURSELF BY CLICKING THE “ALL STARS” FILTER AT THE TOP & NOW FLIP THROUGH EACH FOLDER TO SEE YOUR ONLY BEST PHOTOS. ISN’T THAT AWESOME & TOTALLY WORTH THE EFFORT? YOU GET A GOLD STAR! 

WHOA WARNING
In the end, if you think you have far too many STAR photos in relation to your total photos, you probably got a little too star-happy in your first pass through. That’s okay but now take a second, more-critical look at the ones you starred. Try to be more selective and remove a few stars now that you’ve seen the folder as a whole.

Sometimes you need a second (or third) pass through to really notice the ones that stand out. Those are the ones truly worthy of stars. The others are just supporting cast members. They aren’t bad photos at all — just not THE shots that would crush your soul if they were accidentally deleted and gone for good.

TALKING TIME LIMITS
If you have a zillion photos in your collection, this process could take you more than the 15 minutes, especially if you have to download and install Picasa first. But it is an enjoyable step that you should NOT overlook or skip. Forcing yourself to choose your very best favorite photos will prove priceless in the next 10 days of this process. If it takes you another 15 minutes, so be it. Have fun looking back at your memories & finding your favorites!

© Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Brenda Kruse and PhotoOrganizingPro.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.