Tips and Tricks-January 2005

Having just gotten back from a vacation cruise through the Panama Canal, we have hundreds of megabytes of photographs. My husband and I took pictures with two different cameras and his brother-in-law was also taking pictures. We combined the photos from all three cameras. The result is a lot of pictures to be organized. The cruise was 15 days long and stopped at five ports in addition to the canal.

I have been trying for a month to get the photographs organized, edited and selected. There are many duplicates and many bad photos. One of the nice things about using a digital camera is that you can take more chances with pictures without worrying about the cost of film. The disadvantage of this approach is that you have to weed out a lot of just plain bad images.

I decided to do a bit of a web survey to find some tools that might help. I found a list of programs at the PC World site and picked a few promising free programs. Some are tools to make organizing easier, some are used to create slide shows and some are interesting tools. Let’s start with those.

The first one is a ruler that stays on your desktop and can measure the pixel size of an image and can show how many inches (or centimeters) the photo will be when printed at different dots per inch. Desktop Ruler is available from the developers at http://www.coder.hr/en/download.htm. It has a number of possible configurations, including size, color, transparency and units for the drawing scale. Not only does it show you the photo size, but it also shows the position of the cursor on the screen.

Next is Photo Resizer from http://www.showyourphotos.com/. This utility does just what it says—resizes photos. It has a clean and simple interface. You open the image you want to resize, select the width and height (in pixels), and the quality desired. I tried it with a 9 megabyte tif file, but it couldn’t display the image although it did provide the file size, colors and size in pixels. It worked best with jpeg files. I opened a photo that was 760 KB. It showed me the file size (763,548 bytes), the number of colors (65442) and the width and height of the image (2048x1536). I told it to resize the image to 640 x 480 at 100% quality. In half a second, it resized the file to 255,680 bytes with 18092 colors and the specified width and height.

What might one use this for—suppose you want to send the photo by email. Being the polite person that you are, you don’t want to burden the recipient with an enormous file to download, so you want to reduce the file size. The program includes an email client. You set it up as you would your regular email client and it sends the message for you. Click on a button and your image is automatically included as the attachment to an email. Click one button and off it goes.

Next is a program that also resizes images, but does much more—IrfanView from http://www.irfanview.com/. It is described as a file viewer, but it also allows you to resize images with a number of preset sizes as well as your own size settings. You can also create slideshows of your images with captions. There are utilities to rename files, including batch renaming, batch conversion to different file types and batch resizing. You can display file information with the imagination as well, including a number of bits of information that come in the file such as the width and height of the file. The slideshows can be saved, made to loop and can be burned to CD. You can also create an executable file to run the slideshow without IrFanView. There are too many functions in the program to discuss in this article.

A program with similar functions is My Album. It doesn’t have a many utilities as IrFanView, but it does have a wizard that makes it reasonably easy to set up a slide show or a picture album for printing. You can print a “contact sheet” of your images to use for organizing and indexing your images.

When you create a slideshow, you will see the images as you would on a slide sorter. You can then rearrange the slides for the show.

Again, this program also has more functions than I can describe in this article. While I didn’t try it, it appears that you can add music to the slideshow as well. The one disadvantage of this application is that it appears that the author may no longer be updating or supporting the program. The web site shown in the help file does not exist.

It is fun to explore these kinds of programs because they are free, at least to try them. The PC World site had many more—I have just scratched the surface of what’s available. Try these or something that may help you.

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Copyright 2005

Banner Photo by Charles Scamahorn