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November 09, 2006
[ A NEEDLE IN A DIGITAL HAYSTACK ]
IMAGING'S TRUSTY NIKON clicked over its 10,000 exposure last month. That’s a lot of pictures to have stored in the digital shoe box. Plus the thousands of pictures taken with test cameras and the pictures scanned from old negatives and slides.
So, when we needed the picture of an emu taken at the Zoo a couple of years ago we had no idea where to look. We couldn’t search by file name because it would be something like DSC_1045.jpg. We couldn’t search by date because we couldn’t remember when the picture was taken.
Time to face the facts. We lack the congenital obsession with tidiness that we ought to have if we are going to take so many pictures. They need to be ordered, catalogued and tagged to make searching as easy as typing in the identifying keyword that will bring up all the instances of “emu” on our two internal hard drives, one external drive and dozens of backup CDs and DVDs.
It was obvious that the time had come to grit the teeth, crank up Picasa 2 and make it do its stuff.
Picasa 2 promises that you will “Find and enjoy the pictures on your computer in seconds”. Which, of course, we always knew it would. We didn’t need to be told what it did -- we just couldn’t face the tedium of the initial file tagging.
Picasa 2 is quick. It only takes a few minutes to scan all the hard drives attached to the computer and to display all the jpg, tif, bmp files and even most RAW file formats as well. So there you see the picture thumbnails for all the images on the system.
Except for files on removable storage, such as CDs and DVDs. Picasa is quite explicit about this -- it only works on hard drives.
With Picasa you start at the top -- the most recent pictures in the newest folders -- and work your way down in chronological order. It can be a bit of a revelation. We had no idea that we had so many duplicate folders with so many redundant pictures, so we not only created order out of chaos we also freed up a few gigabytes of disc space.
Files are tagged with “keywords”. Click on any thumbnail and press Control-K and the tagging dialogue box comes up. Type in the tag Picasa starts to create an index. Select several files of the same type and they can all be tagged with one entry.
However, Picasa presumes to guess what the tag should be before you finish typing. We have a lot of pictures of lorikeets but when you type “l” into the box for some reason Picasa thinks you mean “leather”.
But that’s not the worst of it. We have a Pat in our family of whom we have taken many photos. Type in Pat and Picasa says: “Oh, you mean patina.” So every time you type Pat you then have to delete “ina”. Who thought of this? And where is the word list located so that we can edit it?
We now have our photos tagged, indexed, catalogued and easy to search but we never did find the emu. We’ll have to go back to the Zoo.
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Posted by terry at November 9, 2006 12:35 AM
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