Managing Your Collection of Digital Pictures

Owning a digital camera means also not owning enough hard drive space for all those pictures of your dog, your daughter, and your Disneyland vacation. Many people get the wrong impression about the freedom of digital cameras. Without the cost of film you can shoot pictures as much as you want, right? Well, it's true that memory cards are cheap and reusable but you need a place to store all these images you are capturing. There are a couple of things you should get into the habit of doing so that your computer does not become a mess of file folders filled with images that you can't find later.

Upload and Cull

Upload your images onto your computer soon after you take them so you don't forget important details about who is in the picture and what they are doing. Culling is a term used by professional photographers. It means to go through the images and throw any out that are unusable. Professional photographers will sometimes do more than one cull session if it is a large event like a wedding. The first session will include deleting anything that is blurry, exposed incorrectly or anything else that is just a poor picture. The photographer will then go through the images a couple more times whittling them down to images that are important and conducive to the story being told that day. You will probably just need to go through them once. Throw away anything dark or blurry unless it is an image that is particularly meaningful. For example, if you took several images of your brand new baby sleeping, then pick out a couple of the best ones and toss any that look identical or that aren't good images. However, if you only got one image of Grandma dancing at a wedding but it is dark then keep it. Image editing software may be able to make the picture better.

Use Folders and Rename