New software makes keeping track of digital photos a simple task
Peter Wilson
Sun
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It’s your daughter’s birthday party. She’s blowing out the candles. She’s so darn cute. Soon there will be smudges of cake on her face. It’s a digital moment. So you fire up the camera and click away. The images — hey, we don’t call them photos any more — pile up. Half an hour later you have maybe 60 shots. No film, no sweat over cost. Digital cameras — 15.3 million are expected to be shipped this year — make things easy, right? Otherwise why would 23 per cent of Canadian homes have them, with that expected to double again by the end of 2004. Just connect up the camera or memory card and, whoosh, those birthday memories have been sucked into your computer. Yep, now they’re there, along with the 93 images you shot in Arizona last summer, the 46 from Aunt Trish’s wedding in Port Alberni in March, the five you took of that incredible sunset a week ago and some 500 more you’ve loaded into your computer since you got the camera a year ago. Sure you’ve printed a few. And maybe fiddled with editing some others, but most of them are, well, not quite lost, but not quite found either. “When people get a digital camera, they’re not necessarily thinking immediately about what they can do with their digital photos,” said Microsoft Canada marketing manager Lisa Webber. “So, it’s not until six months or maybe a year after they’ve purchased the camera that they start to think about things like organization.” Which means that a lot of us are starting to ponder the problem. Unsurprisingly, major software companies, such as Apple with its iPhoto application, which now comes as part of the iLife package, are there ahead of us — along with some smaller one’s like Victoria‘s ACD Systems International with its ACDSee products. Recently for example, Microsoft came out with its Digital Image Suite 10, which contains a revamped version of its Digital Image Library. And Adobe has just announced that the new 3.0 version of Photoshop Elements for Windows will also have added features for those looking to keep track of their photos. And Adobe’s Mac version of Photoshop Elements 3.0 will integrate more closely with iPhoto. ACD — which already has 20 million users worldwide of ACDSee, according to company CEO Douglas Vandekerkhove — will be launching version 7.0 of its software, aimed at high-end amateurs and those who need industrial-strength organizing, within the next few weeks. Software companies try to anticipate users’ needs, but often those of us who are piling up the digital images for the first time — including more and more women — aren’t quite sure how they want to keep them catalogued. “I wouldn’t say that digital camera users are looking for something specific, it’s more that they know they need help organizing,” said Webber. “So what we do is provide a ton of flexibility because people think in all kinds of different ways about how they would store photos.” Perhaps the most common of these is to sort by exact date taken or by month or by year. “They’ll also do things by event,” said Webber. “And enthusiasts, especially on the higher end, might think about doing it by file size, because they understand certain of their photos are big.” Or they could store by file type or format like .tiff or .jpeg. As well, programs often allow people to assign key words to photographs. “I have nephews, so I assign a category that is Adrian and Anthony, for example, because those are my nephews’ names,” said Webber. “So whenever I download a photo from my camera that includes Adrian and Anthony in it I assign that keyword to that photography. “Then I can filter on Adrian and Anthony and come up with a whole list of what I have for them. That makes it your own interactive filing system.” At the high amateur and professional end, with products like ACDSee, searches can be done on such things as camera make or model, exposure, flash, focal length, shutter speed, etc. “Our product is not geared for the entry-level users, although it’s extremely easy to use and we have a lot of those users,” said Vandekerkhove. “It’s geared to advanced hobbyists and enthusiasts who have acquired thousands of images and would like to do more with them. “In the old days you had an old shoebox with a few hundred photos in it. Now you’ve got a hard drive with thousands and we think in a year that will be in the tens of thousands.” Added Vandekerkhove: “So ACDSee is designed to be very fast and efficient at handling that amount of images.” Vandekerkhove said that his product is also making inroads in the corporate market such as insurance companies, which need to take images for claims purposes. “What’s happening is that before where they would have had a, say $30,000-a-month film processing budget, which seriously limited how many images they could take. Today the cost of taking thousands of images is very small.” What these corporations need is tools that can efficiently work with huge amounts of digital information,” said Vandekerkhove. PHOTO SOFTWARE WITH IMAGE CATALOGUING CAPABILITIES: ACDSee 6.0 (7.0 out soon) from ACD Systems, $65. Order on the net (www.acdsystems.com) or buy at stores like Staples. ACDSee PowerPack (contains ACDSee 6.0 plus a photo editor , etc.), $100. Available from London Drugs or online. Digital Image Suite 10 from Microsoft, $189.95 (but $70 worth of rebates are available). Available at most software outlets. iPhoto 4 from Apple, comes with Mac computers or as part of iLife ’04, $59. Available at stores that carry Mac software. Photoshop Elements 2.0 from Adobe (3.0 out soon), $140. Available at most software outlets. Note, there are many other digital image cataloguing software packages available. Ran with fact box “Photo Software With Image Cataloguing Capabilities”, which has been appended to the end of the story. © The Vancouver Sun 2004 |
