Do you have thousands of photos lurking on your PC or worse yet on your card and you just don’t know how to organize digital images? I can help with that. I’ve organized over 12,000 photos using Picasa and Shutterfly digital photos software. I use Picasa which is free software to upload photos onto my hard drive where I clean them up and organize them. To download Picasa to your PC visit picasa.google.com. After I clean up using picasa — for example removing red eye, cropping and straightening — I upload the pics to Shutterfly.
Shutterfly is a free online storage service, but it is so much more. First and foremost it provides a great offsite backup for your photos. It has saved me at least once when my hard drive crashed. All my photos on my hard drive were lost, but I had them safely stored at Shutterly. At Shutterfly you can also do many amazing things like make photo books, Christmas cards, invitations, calendars, photo gifts and so much more. Join Shutterfly free of charge at shutterfly.com.
Here is my Picasa screen showing folders and thumbnails of images.
The next step I recommend is starting to follow my organization with your new images. You can go back and catch up with older images as time allows. My method is based on date taken. It’s my opinion that subject organization can get cluttered. As of right now, I have 245 folders on picasa. Each folder is named as follows YEAR-MO Subject. For example I have several 2010-12 folders each as different subjects. One is 2012-12 Christmas Eve. Another is 2010-12 December. When I mark a subject as simply the month name, it means it contains miscellaneous photos of that particular month.
Here's my Shutterfly screen capture with folder listing on left and thumbnails of each folder.
Once everything is organized in Picasa the way I want it, I upload the images from the folder on Shutterfly using the same folder name. I currently have 291 folders on Shutterfly. I like having the pics in both places as I like to work on the pics on my hard drive for various projects. Once moved to Shutterfly, they have the full image. You can work on Shutterfly projects fine with them or order prints from Shutterfly. (By the way you can have your Shutterfly prints made at your local Target store,) The images just don’t translate back to your hard drive. So I recommend keeping them in both places. Only after I safely have the images uploaded to Shutterfly do I clear my memory card. After which immediately charge my battery so I’m ready to go for my next round of photographs.
Shutterfly is great for sharing pictures with family and friends. If they are also Shutterfly members they can copy any pictures you share with them to their Shutterfly account. For example, we just went on a company business business trip and as we are all Shutterfly members, we can easily share pics. I believe Shutterfly offers incentives for referring friends.
I’ve also made numerous wonderful memory books for our family. For years, I made traditional scrapbook yearbooks. These are great, but I have just one copy and if anything ever happened to it, it would be irreplaceable. With the Shutterfly books, I can order copies for other family members, as well as replace any books that would become damaged. Once you make a book, it stays on your Shutterfly account unless you delete it. I also make the book and wait for the many specials Shutterfly runs through the year. For the past two years, I’ve been able to save 50% on my yearbook and get free shipping. That’s quite a savings. We’ve also made books and given them as gifts to family and friends.
I know there is much more that can be done on Picasa, but haven’t delved any deeper as what I’m doing is serving my purpose. By all means, check it out and see how you can get as much as your need from it.
Shutterfly Canvas of Portofino
Get on Shutterfly and play with the many cool projects they offer. You can do Share Sites with friends, make photo books, have images turned into canvas wall hangings. We have a fabulous canvas portrait of Portofino, Italy. It looks like a painting. You can make calendars, stationary and various photo gifts like purses, bags and even jewelry. I can’t recommend this site enough.
Good luck getting your digital images in order.
