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Project 2011 Tech-Awesome YOU! (Pt. 1: photos and videos)
Look, I’m not interested in facing this terrifying new year (2011, by the way) after the rampaging, rabid wolfmother that was 2010 any more than you are. I mean, certainly not sober.
But rather than cowering under some stairs (true story: Harry Potter started out that way), let us face January boldly, with resolve to change our slovenly tech ways. Let us decide to head off future tech problems at the (metaphoric) pass by getting the work done now. Trust me, you’ll have a better year if you take a few small measures now and get right with your data.
In that vein, I present Project 2011 Tech-Awesome YOU!, three blog entries under one unfortunately titled header meant to guide you through a few things you should be doing right now to ease into 2011 like an oiled-up CD sliding into a slot-loading drive. (Note: do not oil up CDs of any kind, ever, except for the purposes of simile.)
Today, we’ll start simple by talking about getting your holiday photos and videos organized. Tuesday, we’ll discuss the Boring Boogeyman of keeping up with your data, setting up and maintaining regular, safe backups and on Wednesday we’ll take on tech de-cluttering, whether it’s hard drive messiness or disposing of your old gadget safely.
Photos and videos: partners in memories
One of the tech sins I’m most guilty of is keeping photos and videos I shoot on memory cards. They sit in cameras or in their carrying cases after I’ve neglected to transfer images and videos (never mind backing them up) to my computer.
Sometimes I’d keep photos on a memory card for months or years. I finally learned what a bad idea this was when one of my memory cards was wiped out after a friend accidentally deleted everything on the card. (Yes, it was really an accident. Yes, we’re still friends.)
A semi-pro photographer friend of mine gave me great advice that I try to remember when I’m dealing with digital images and videos: stop thinking of those little SD memory cards as storage and think of them as transport. Try to transfer photos and clear those memory cards after every session of shooting or as soon as possible. (Doing it at the end of each day you take a lot of photos is a good habit to get into.)
Reformatting memory cards instead of continually using them and keeping files on them helps them perform better. And memory cards are far too likely to get lost, stolen along with your camera or camera bag, or to simply get damaged or erased in many different kind of ways.
And that goes for the built-in memory on your smart phone, too. As phone cameras have gotten better and we use them more often to capture images and video, we’re neglecting to transfer those memories off the phones and onto a more permanent form of data storage. Phones are even more likely to get lost or stolen than cameras. Don’t lose all your pictures and videos by keeping them stored on your phone.
Let’s start small: rather than dealing with your entire stack of un-archived memory cards, just make a priority for now to get all your holiday 2010 photos and videos off the cameras and into your computer.
Now, here’s the part that trips a lot of people up: where should you put all those photos and videos and how do you keep them organized?
Some people have elaborate folder systems on their computers to store photos. Make your life easier and decide on a piece of software that can make it easier to organize and archive your photos and videos.
If you have an Apple computer, you likely have iPhoto built-in. That’s a good, basic way to import your photos, tag them (using keywords to make it easier to search/catalog photos and videos later), and even organize them by date, facial recognition or geography (options that are available in more recent versions of iPhoto).
A more advanced piece of software for Macs is Apple’s Aperture 3, which offers more involved photo editing. I was leery of Aperture for a while because it didn’t have the ability to catalog videos, just photos, but the most recent version has added video cataloging. You can also import iPhoto libraries into Aperture.
Available for both Macs and PC is Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 3, another pro tool for digital photography workflow. It’s one I haven’t used, but some photographers swear by it.
On the PC side, I find myself continuing to use Google’s free Picasa 3 software (see video above). The photo editing options aren’t nearly as robust on it than, say, Aperture, but it does a good job importing a wide variety of photo and video formats, it’s fast and, best of all, free.
And if the thought of sitting at the computer and fiddling with USB cables and import options is your idea of a nightmare, you could always go wireless. Eye-Fi memory cards, which are compatible with lots of still and video cameras, can transfer your pics and videos to the web or to a computer via Wi-Fi, even while you’re still shooting. Once those photos are transferred, you can get to the business of getting them tagged and organized.
Once my wife and I started having kids, I got more serious about archiving photos of our daughters. I typically organize sets of photos into months (“Lilly and Carolina November 2010,” etc…) and separate photos of special events (birthdays, concerts, work-related images and videos) into their own folders.
It’s good to tag images with names of people, names of locations and anything else that’ll help you later when you’re searching for a particular image, video or set. You could tag with the device you shot with (say “IPhone” or “Nikon SLR”) and with the name of an event (“ACL,” “Austin City Limits,” “ACL Fest”). You could also tag with the kind of image or video (“portraits,” “wedding photos,” “faces,” “travel”). You can’t over-tag . Anything that’ll help you sort and locate later is helpful. You can tag batches of similar images or videos at a time; this will save you a lot of time and aggravation.
All of the apps mentioned above allow you flexibility on how you structure folders or projects and how you tag them. Some of them also allow you to export photos directly to online services like Facebook, Flickr or Picasa Web Albums and share them with friends and family.
Once you’ve got your photos organized and readily available, you’re more likely to print, make DVDs, create slide shows, organize family scrap books or do other photo or video projects. Don’t let the excuse, “If only I had all my photos and videos in one place” keep you from doing so.
So, before things get too crazy, start with your Christmas and New Year’s photos and, as time permits, work backward through your 2010 backlog of photos. Plan to get all the photos and videos off your cameras, phones and any other devices at least once a month going forward.
Those memory cards should be wiped clean and your photos and videos should be safe and backed up (which we’ll talk more about tomorrow).
Got more tips on importing and organizing photos? Post them in the comments.
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By John Taylor
January 3, 2011 4:31 PM | Link to this
For smartphone users on Flickr, Flickroid is a good app seamlessly upload your smartphone photos straight to your Flickr account.