Photo Processes

July 24, 2007
Grand Bay-Westfield, NB

I copy photos from our digital cameras into folders organized by date. I’ve toyed with other schemes (e.g., by subject matter), but the labeling process can get cumbersome. I’m sticking with Google’s Picasa service for photo sharing for the time being since it’s free and relatively easy to use. Because of the file size of the photos from the camera (Geri’s pocket Canon S230 generates files about 800k-1.5mb in size and my Nikon D200 creates jpegs of 4-6mb), I try to resize them for posting online. This ends up being a multi-step process:

1) Using Adobe Bridge or Windows Explorer, I select the pictures I want to post and copy them to an empty “work in process” folder.

2) I use Adobe Bridge’s link to Photoshop to resize all the photos in one step to 1024x768 pixels. This is a relatively good size for online viewing (the originals are better for printing), and the automation is welcome since it would be tedious to change the size of each image one at a time.

3) Photoshop puts all the resized images in a new subfolder, so I then use Bridge’s “batch rename” function to change the file names to reflect that I’ve resized them.

4) I then use Picasa to organize the resized images into “albums” (Picasa’s term) where a basic description of what’s being shown can be supplied.

5) Once the images are in albums, I use Picasa to create a caption for each one providing a little commentary on the shot.

6) Once this is completed, the albums are uploaded to the Picasa online service. If I’m online, I usually do this as the albums are created; otherwise I just save them for a later time.

7) The last step is to clean up by deleting the working copies of the images in the “work in process” folder.

No wonder it takes so long!