First Attempt at Organizing Digital Picture Files

I managed to upload all my digital photographs from my digital camera to my PC. So, all 200+ photos (jpg files) are now sitting in some folder somewhere. So, what next?

The first thing I wanted to do was to look at each picture, and then decide what to do with it.

As a Windows user, I just double clicked the first image file. Depending on what program the jpg file extension was associated with, either a browser window or a graphics program would fire up with the selected picture open. In my case, it was Firefox browser.

That was all fine. Next, I wanted to take a look at the next picture. So, I fiddled my way through all the open windows to find the next file, and repeated the above procedure. The result was another new window open for that file. Pretty soon, I was spending more time finding the right window (and killing the old ones) than looking at and admiring the pictures themselves!

Luckily, Derek P., a friend of this blog, pointed me to this software: irfanview.

irfanview (version 3.97, Windows-only) is described as a image viewer on its website. That is a little too modest because it can also do some simple editing tasks, e.g, converting from 1 format to another, convert from color to greyscale, cropping/rotating the image, etc. For a fancier feature set, you need to move up to something like a Gimp2 which we featured earlier in this blog.

To move through a directory, open any image file in that directory in irfanview. After you have it open, you may want to click View/Display Options, and choose Fit Images to Desktop. Depending on your picture and your screen's resolution, the default Fit Window to Image may require you to scroll to see the whole picture. Then click the left or right arrow to go back or forward 1 image file at a time.

Although you can do the navigating in Windows Explorer, you need to manage all the open windows, and keep track of what files you have visited and yet to visit. The advantage of irfanview is that it will do that for you and you don't need to do any prior preparation.

Besides just viewing the pictures, irfanview can also automatically create a slide show for you. You don't need to import the files into Powerpoint or OpenOffice Presentation. It is really handy.

irfanview amounts to my first attempt to organize my digital photos. It worked quite well for the simple objective of just going over the pictures one by one. Soon after, I wanted to further organize my pictures into a more structured photo album or gallery. I will go over the software I now use for that purpose in a later blog entry.