Up until now, I had just kept my pictures in folders, roughly arranged by naming each folder with the date that I downloaded the pictures and possibly a vague subject. As a result, pictures were simply hard to browse through. I was constantly opening and closing folders, waiting for thumbnails to pop up, and so on. While I was in Jordan over the summer, I saw a better way. A freelance photographer/Deerfield alumnus who was with us had a fabulous photo managing program on his Apple laptop—it arranged them by the date they were taken using EXIF information, he could easily flip through pages of thumbnails, regardless of where the actual photos were kept, and he could tag them with the names of their subjects, their locations, or their probably usability in a publication.
So I recently installed Ubuntu Linux 6.10 on my desktop. My version of Ubuntu was starting to have issues (mostly inflicted by me), and I had done a bad job of partitioning my hard drives. Once I had the new system up and running, I went poking around online to see if I could find a good photo managing application. I happened upon f-spot.
It has been a revelation in organising my photos. I plug in the memory card for my camera, click import, and the photos all fly into their neatly arranged folders. Then I can see them in thumbnails and apply tags. If I need to go back and find something again, I can filter by tags (all photos tagged “Matt Miller”, all photos tagged “Thanksgiving 2006″ or all photos tagged “Diane Canning” and “goofy”). The program even produces beautiful html galleries and if I ever decided to use a free online photo sharing site such as Google’s Picasa or Flickr, it will export to those too.
Now I have to forget about how great that all is and focus on exams for the next week….
Categories: Pictures, Site
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