Organize Your Digital Photos

Keeping your digital photographs organized can really help you along with helping your family and friends.   I started using Picasa a few years ago and Google just recently released Version 3 of the software.  Today I’m going to show you how I use Picasa to organize my pictures and also use it to share with Facebook.

The first thing you should do is have just one folder where you store all of your photos. This isn’t a necessity, but it makes it much easier to backup your pictures which you should be doing. I personally have a subfolder for each year then have another subfolder with the date and the name of the event.  My folder structure looks like this:

E:\Pictures\2008\(12-9) Weekly Blog Post

Once you have that setup, go and get Picasa (Windows & Linux only).  After installing Picasa you can have it scan your computer for your pictures or you have the opportunity to choose a folder manually.  Now that all of your pictures are loaded in Picasa, you can go through and do some manual fixes such as redeye and color balance. You can also Star your favorite photos for easy viewing in the future. The other great thing that I use Picasa for is sharing my photos to Facebook.  After setting Picasa up, you can then go get the Picasa Uploader.  This allows you to create a Facebook album and upload only the pictures you want to it.  It will automatically resize the photos for you and it makes it extremely easy to share your photos.  I should note that I do not use a Mac and have not tried iPhoto.

*Note: I can only attest to how great Picasa is. I am aware of a plugin for iPhoto that allows you to upload to Facebook in the same manner as I mentioned above.