Friday, April 3, 2009

You've scanned your photos... Now What???

Last week, I spent some time with my new scanner and I was pretty amazed. I managed to scan over 1500 photos in a little over 2 hours. The scanner is lightning fast and so efficient.

Now that these photos are digitized, I have some great software that makes my life so much easier. It's called Shoebox and it's made exclusively for the Mac. But if you're PC user, don't stop reading! I understand that the product called ACDSee works very similarly.

My process is simple. I insert my disc with my photos on it into my computer drive. I then open Shoebox. Within Shoebox, I can see all my photos on the disc. Then, I just start tagging them. The way I scan my photos is by years. So for instance, I can open the folder on my disc titled "1995." From there I will see all the photos from that year. (I could have scanned by category or topic, but I choose to scan mainly by year.) Within that year, I start assigning tags. So, on one photo, I can tag it with as many categories as I choose. For an example, Let's take a photo from Brianna's birth.

I tagged this photo with "1995," "Brianna," "Nick," and "4th of July."

Now, I don't need to know where this photo is on my computer anymore. I can just go into Shoebox and type in one of my tagged categories. If I type, "4th of July," every photo I've ever taken on the 4th of July will appear. Ditto if I type in "Brianna," or "Nick," or so on. I hope you get my gist.

And while this is nice for my more recent photos, it's fantastic for the older ones. For example, my 25 year old niece is getting married next year. Most likely, we will do a video montage for her and her fiance. With Shoebox, it's quite easy. I can just type in "Theresa" and every picture that I own of Theresa appears on my screen. It also tells me where it's stored. What's even better, is that if the montage is to include every family member, I can type in all their names and I can find the photos of Theresa with anyone she's ever known! It's great fun to see what you've got on file... and never has it been faster to find photos! I just found this photo of Theresa and her great grandmother and posted it here within 2 minutes...


Before I scanned these photos, I couldn't have told you where this photo was. Either in an actual shoebox, a photo album I haven't opened in years, or a tupperware bin filled to the top with photos that my mother gave me. It might have taken me hours to find it... if I could even have found it at all.

Shoebox is great for all my photo needs. For scrapbooking, it's unbelievable. The same way I tag my photos, I tag my digital art supplies. So if I'm working on a layout, I can type in "swirl" or "frame" or whatever, and all my elements are right there for me to see. Invaluable!

I hope this posting helps and if you have further questions or I can help you in any way, please feel free to give me a call.

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