Ultimate Digital Camera Buyer’s Guide The Ultimate Guide to Buying Your First Digital Camera
Managing Your Digital Images
Why Manage My Photos?
Once you start taking pictures with your digital camera, you will find yourself with another issue: how to store all of your photos so you can find them again. Most users start off by putting them in folders on their hard drive, perhaps organized by date or month. One problem with this is that unless you rename the images, the all end up looking like DSC92_001.jpg, which is pretty hard to remember what the picture is.
Dragging your photos from the memory card to your PC is the easy part! Most beginning digital camera users either dump all of their pictures into one big folder, relying on the thumbnail display that is part of Windows XP, or have some sort of simple folder structure like
2003/January, 2002/February, etc.
Once you accumulate several thousands of photos (and if you like most people, you'll take a LOT more pictures, since there is NO developing cost), you'll realize that it hard to find the photo you took seven months ago with a giraffe, or you'll accidentally delete some photos. The key here is organization.
Digital Image Management Tools
Digital Image Management Tools are designed to import images, index images, tag images, and search for images. These tools range from free to hundreds of dollars.
Most digital users begin to think about how to store their photos when one of two things happen: they can't find that ONE image they want to print, or their hard disk fails, they don't have any backup of their kids birthday party or other significant event.
There are several free and low cost applications for the PC platform that will suck in your photos, let you organize them into multiple categories, and burn backup copies of the pictures to CD-Rs. The key with these applications, I learned, is to organize and tag your images on a regular basis, don't let 2,000 images pile up in a directory, then attempt to rename, label, and categorize them in one evening!
(This is one page that needs some work!)
List of Digital Image Management Tools
I’ve compiled a comprehensive list of tools at my companion site, UltimateSLR.com. You can also view a list of Image Management Tools at Google.
Send comments, broken links, and suggestions to Dave. Ultimate Site for Digital SLR Cameras: UltimateSLR.com Last updated Friday, May 06, 2005 at 07:32 PM
Once you start taking pictures with your digital camera, you will find yourself with another issue: how to store all of your photos so you can find them again. Most users start off by putting them in folders on their hard drive, perhaps organized by date or month. One problem with this is that unless you rename the images, the all end up looking like DSC92_001.jpg, which is pretty hard to remember what the picture is. 
