Software helps you keep track of your digital photographs

By Kim Komando

With digital cameras, it's easy to accumulate thousands of pictures. Finding individual photos can be a huge problem. Most file names are nonsensical. It's hard to tell if DSC005246.jpg is a picture of your vacation, your wedding or a friend's birthday.

Several software programs are available to help shutterbugs organize their collection of digital and scanned photos. Many are less than $50. Gannett News Service

I recently looked at some of the more popular titles found on store shelves. Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 (www.adobe.com), Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 5 (www.jasc.com), Nero PhotoShow Elite (www.nero.com) and Ulead Photo Explorer 8 (www.ulead.com) run on Windows.

Mac users will want to take a look at Apple iPhoto 4 (www.apple.com, part of iLife '04) or the Mac version of Ulead Photo Explorer. All cost less than $50.

Photo organization software manages digital photos by searching your computer's hard drive, memory cards and photo CDs. If you own a scanner, you can also import scanned prints.

As a time saver, it's best to consolidate all of your pictures into one folder (such as the My Pictures folder in Windows, found under My Documents). You want to separate your photos from hundreds of pictures and graphics used by the operating system or other programs.

Each program allows you to describe pictures with tags and keywords. They all use different methods of accomplishing this, but each does a good job.

This is the most time-consuming part. It's also the most important. The more information you provide, the easier it will be to find specific photos later.

Don't describe a picture of your kids at the beach generically. It's better to type, "Karen and Brendan building a sand castle at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, August 2004." This will help you in the future because you might end up with hundreds of photos of Karen and Brendan.

As you assign keywords and descriptions, you can edit pictures as well. Adobe Photoshop Album and iPhoto offer basic adjustments, such as cropping and bright/contrast changes.

The others also do that, but they go beyond the ordinary by offering filters and other correction functions. Jasc has a wizard that makes touch-ups easy. Nero and Ulead have a large number of customizable effects.

Once your photos are organized, tagged and edited, you can move them to CDs. This frees up space on the hard drive because picture files can gobble up space quickly.

All of the programs help you burn pictures onto a CD, but Adobe, Jasc and Ulead also place thumbnails on your hard drive.

These are used to index the pictures contained on the CDs. You no longer have to insert CDs blindly to look for a particular photo. When you search, the program tells you the picture of Karen and Brendan at the beach is on CD 17, for example.

Although the primary function of the programs is management, you can also get creative with your photos.

Create a slide show of your vacation at the beach set to "Under the Boardwalk." Burn the slide shows onto CDs to share with your friends and family.

Creating customized desktop wallpaper and screen savers from your own photos is accomplished with just a few clicks of the mouse. It beats looking at the generic Windows and Mac desktop pictures.