In my last article about Picasa I have discussed the most efficient way to transfer your pictures from your camera to your computer using Picasa. If Picasa is setup correctly, transferring your pictures with Picasa can really save you a lot of time.
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Selecting the best pictures from a set of digital pictures is one of the most common tasks for a digital photographer. This used to be the case even during the film era. Sometimes you would just print one copy of each picture in a roll of film and then you would physically select the best pictures to put in your photo album. The rest would end up in some envelope in a shoebox that would start collecting dust. Well, this happens in the digital world as well, except for…the dust. But how do you select your best pictures efficiently in a digital world?
As you know, I keep looking for simple solutions for organizing my digital pictures. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Andrea D’Intino about his company’s product called Tabbles. Tabbles provides an innovative approach to organizing all the files on your computer, not only your pictures. I’m hoping to be able to provide a full review of this product, but for now you can read my interview with Andrea where he describes his own company’s product.
If you have been using image keywords or tags for a while, the topic of managing your keywords is very relevant. If you’re new however, to image keywords, then this topic might not seem necessary, at least not now. However, after applying keywords to your images without any strategy, you will end up having a pile of keywords that you can’t sort out. Just like folders can become unusable if not named and organized correctly, keywords too can become unusable if not maintained properly. In order to avoid this problem you need to create efficient keywords, or in other words, you need a controlled vocabulary. But how do you create a controlled vocabulary?
When learning something new the first steps are always the hardest and the most important. In order to accomplish something, you have to start somewhere. This is also the case when it comes to learning how to organize your pictures. I can talk a lot about efficient folder structures, image metadata, IPTC, XMP and other things like this. But many times I people simply ask me: how do I start organizing my pictures? I think that’s a great question.
Last week I published the first part of the interview I conducted with Hans Fremuth from Metability Software about image metadata. In this section Hans talked about the current state of the image metadata standard development and in particular about the XMP standard developed by Adobe. In addition, Hans provides insight into how he organizes his own pictures on his computer. This article is the second part of the interview. 
Picasa has recently released version 3.5 according to the Picasa blog. They have not updated everyone yet, meaning that when you open up Picasa, it would not prompt you to update. However, you can download the new version if you want. I did that yesterday and played with some of the new features. I believe the new version has some cool new things and some that…well, I’m not sure.
Last month I have created a 
Keywords or tags are the hottest topic when it comes to organizing your pictures. The standards used for capturing photo keywords and saving them to the actual image files are XMP and IPTC. It is important to understand what these terms mean and how to use them, but it is also important to understand how the actual keywords end up being added to your image files. So what does an image organizer software do in order to create and add keywords to image files ?
I have been looking for a long time for some software that would allow me to manage keywords in an efficient manner. What do I mean by efficient? It’s pretty simple: all I want is the ability to group my keywords into categories or domains. For example: I want 
software to do that. Now, I was suspecting that Adobe Lightroom might do what I wanted but the price was way too much for me! Eventually I decided to give Lightroom a try and found out why people like it.
Once you get started with Digital Asset Management (DAM) software you will quickly run into another management issue: your keywords. I believe any DAM software user will eventually ask himself the question: how am I supposed to create my keywords? Reading various internet sources on the subject I usually run into two kinds of advice: some say you should just start adding keywords to your images while others say you should be careful and think through your keywords before creating them. Even though it seems that most advice falls in the first category, I happen to fall into the second category. I do believe that you should be careful when you create keywords primarily because if you create too many, then you will have to manage your keywords as well pretty soon…as if managing your pictures is not enough headache. 
It is rare when a complex problem can have a simple solution. Most of the times however, a complex problem can have a simple solution that only works well for some of the times. When “some of the times” is “most of the times” for you, then the simple solution will work fine. However if “some of the times” does turn out not to be “most of the times” then the simple solution breaks down very easily. This is the case with the folder based method of organizing your pictures. So, how do you know when folders are not enough?
