Saturday, November 24, 2007

Photo Organization, Revisited

We recently purchased Photoshop Elements in order to be able to do some more advanced editing to our photos. It happens to come with a photo organizer, so i thought i'd try it out. So, the last couple times i downloaded photos from our camera, i used it rather than Picasa. i took Adam's suggestion and started keeping the photos in folders by year, month, and day taken. i'm trying out the Edits subfolder as well, but it's kind of hard, as Elements automatically saves any (quick) changes you do to the same folder with an _edited-x added.

Anyways, i'm glad to say that it has been working out pretty well. i like the organizer in Elements better than Picasa's because it allows me to visually see my tags and drag them onto sets of photos. It is much quicker than manually tagging every photo (maybe there's a better way in Picasa, but i don't know it). i can also get the tags to automatically show up on Flickr when i upload them, so that's a plus as well. Picasa makes it easier to do simple edits to your photos (like lightening, color temperature, straightening, ...), but i'm pretty sure that i'll learn how to do them properly in Photoshop, and i'll have better control that way.

One other drawback to the Photoshop organizer was that it ran a little slow. That, however, was taken care of by a recent (today) RAM upgrade: 1 to 3 GB. It amazes me how quickly prices drop on computer components, especially memory. i would definitely recommend, if your computer seems a bit slow, to first make sure you have enough RAM. That is the easiest way to speed up your computer. Remember, though, that your computer can't address more than about 3.5 GB, unless you're running a 64-bit OS (this useless bit of trivia brought to you by the fact that i read random technical blogs).

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