TECH TALK: What to do with all those holiday pictures?
By Donovan Hoggan
It’s summer time, which often leads to holidays, which often lead to pictures … lots of pictures.
One of the great things about digital cameras is that you can take crazy amounts of pictures without having to pay crazy amounts of developing costs. The down-side of this is, now that I have all of these pictures, what am I supposed to do with them?If you have a Mac, you’re in fat city. iPhoto, which comes built-in, is great for organizing and tagging pictures and is pretty good at editing pictures (cropping, removing red-eye, etc.).
Use Events to organize your pictures, then Keepsakes to put them into a slide show, photobook, calendar or card. You can also use iDVD to make your slide show into a DVD that’s playable on any computer, but also on regular DVD players. iDVD is the only software I know that does that reliably.
If you don’t have a Mac, then you still have options. My favourite is Picasa. It’s an offering from Google, so you’ll need an account to use it. Once you’re set up, it offers basic editing, and also lets you share your photos. ou can create albums, password protect them if you like, and then share them via a link. This link saves you from clogging up family member’s email boxes with ten different emails because you couldn’t put all of them in one message.
The other benefit of Picasa is that your pictures are backed-up by Google. Anyone who reads this column regularly knows how important I think this is.
If you’re looking for the back-up and online accessibility of Picasa for your Mac, you can use Picasa or MobileMe. MobileMe isn’t free but, along with sharing your pictures, it puts your calendar, contacts and emails on the web for easy, but secure, access.
The most important step to take is ensure that you have more than one copy of your pictures. If you just leave them on the little card in your camera, you need to assume that you’re going to lose them.
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