Organising Digital Photo Collection (1 Viewer)

[Darren Lewis]

I've just got back from holiday and downloaded all these digial photos from My Nikon CoolPix onto my PC in a single folder (uninspiringly called img0001). I've also got some traditional print photos taken with my SLR that I want to scan in and manipulate.

What's a good way to store and organise photos on a PC? Starting with a good database-type system has to be the way to go. Names such as DCN0001.jpg are pretty meaningless. There are a few software packages that I've seen such as Jasc After Shot, and Fotostation - anyone using these?

My Nikon provides this IPTC field which presumably is stored in the file data, along with the other info.

I want to be able to catalogue the photos and view them in slideshows on screen, as well as be able to store the permanent finished photos on CDR. If I could then view them on my TV screen via the DVD player, that would be superb.

I also want to build a "stock" photo/image library so that I can mess about with images in Paint Shop Pro.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Darren.

 

[Arthur Legardo]

I went to digital photography show recently and in one of the seminar rooms there was a small demo of ACDSee 5.0, a cataloging program for all of your media files. It allows you to archive your photos and do search by keywords that you can give to your photos (without having to rename the actual file). ACDSee has a 30 day or 45 day demo available from their website of the regular version or the Powerpack which includes more features. Give it a go!

Arthur

 

[John Watson]

In one of your comments, I think your are asking if jpegs on a CD-R can be shown as a slideshow on your TV, via a DVD player.

Perhaps I have the same type of question then, as I'd like to get a scanner and get antique fotos in the computer. Then on a bigger screen TV.

Do we need modern DVD players specially enabled for CD-R, or is this VCD? I don't belive the player I got 2 1/2 years ago says anything other than DVD compatible, so maybe I need a new one?

And would I scan or skip to the next picture, just as I do to go to the next chapter of a DVD?

And would the TV resolution of these photos be decent or would they look blurry on a large screen?

Hope you don't mind my piggy-backing on your questions Darren...

 

[Darren Lewis]

Thanks for the help so far. I'll have a look at ACDSee when I get back to my broadband connection and can download it (I'm too impatient on pay-as-you-go dialup).
I think I'll dump all the photos from the camera into an "inbox" folder, where they can stay until sorted for the final album folders.
I've been thinking of storing the final edited/cropped/tweaked photos in "album" folders using the US date system for name eg 2002-10-Holiday. That way I can easily see when they were taken. Still not sure about naming the individual files though - something like holiday001.jpg doesn't seem that great. But if something like ACDSee can create captions and keywords and build a searchable catalogue (even if photos on a CDR) that would be great.
My stock photos can be in a "stock" folder organised by what the pic is of eg sky, wildlife, cars, etc...

Hope you don't mind my piggy-backing on your questions Darren...

No, of course not. The more the merrier
Darren.

 

[Arthur Legardo]

VCDs are for motion video, if you want to see your photos on your DVD player, you'd want to burn them on a CDR using the Photo CD spec.

 

[Darren Lewis]

So can you burn them in photo CD spec format using Nero, and then stick the CDR into your DVD player and hit play? (I'm not at home at the moment so haven't got access to Nero to try it).

Thanks.

Darren.

 

[Arthur Legardo]

Hmm, here's a quote from the Nero help file:

Starting with Nero V5.0, still images can be added to a (Super) Video CD compilation. In contrast to movies, still images can and have to be encoded by Nero itself. As of V5.5, only JPEG files can be dragged into the MPEG section of a (S)VCD compilation.

Nero's aim is to make the generation of simple slideshows as easy as possible. This is why it uses the user interface which is already familiar from the audio compilation (a linear list of items) and generates a disc on which these items are played in the given order. Images are prepared automatically for the resolution expected by (S)VCD, which means that the resolution of the original images is arbitrary.

Open mouth, insert foot...shows you what I know! :b

 

[Jereme D]

I've been using Thumbs Plus for a few years and it works very well. It has basic image editing features such as crop, rotate, resize, and even some filters that you can apply. It also has an excellent system for categorizing images. You can enter information in a number of different fields for each image, then search for images based on any of that information. You can group favorite images together in galleries even if they're not in the same folder. There is a trial version available at cerious.com.

 

[John Wilson]

I've been using Adobe ActiveShare for awhile now and it seems to work well for my use. Its FREE and runs on my WinME system. I haven't tried it on XP yet. You can check it out HERE
good Luck