Gui Cremerius

Keeping my digital photos organized has become a rather large task. First keeping a meaningful structure, then finding naming convention that suits my needs and then finding the renaming tool that could implement that naming convention. Besides of that, I wanted some kind of tool that allowed me to find and preview the pictures beyond what the native Windows tools provided.
As probably anybody else, I started with the software tools that came with my first camera. This was a Fuji Fine Pix camera and the tool that came with it was not that bad at all, at least not for me, a non pro photographer. Then I stumbled upon Picasa -later acquired by Google- and I loved the interface and the ability to email pictures directly out of it on a reduced size. Before I had to make a copy of the pictures I wanted to email, launch whatever photo editing software I had and reduce the picture to something reasonable for email. I’m talking here point and shoot family kind of pictures. I also started to create sideshows for family and friends, and Picasa came in really handy for that.
So I lived for a while the Fuji Fine Pix software mainly as a renaming tool, and Picasa as an basic editing (red eye removal and cropping) and archiving tool, but eventually I hit the archiving wall. I do store my pictures in folders and copy those folders to CD/DVD, but I started to lose track of what I had off-line, and looking for an older photo was not an easy task anymore. Picasa does not keep track of the ones on CD/DVD, so I had to start looking for something else. It took me literally years to find something that worked for me, since everything I found was part of a bloated suite of utilities I didn’t need or wanted and with a pricetag attached to them that was always more as I wanted to shell out.
The other day I was looking for something else and came across a blogpost at Lifehacker that gave some hints about Picasa. Down there in the comments I found two gems, one was regarding a cataloging tool, somehow similar to Picasa know as FotoAlbum Pro 6 that is a lot better than Picasa. It not only has the archiving piece I was looking for, but also an easy way of adding comments, captions and tags (or keywords) to the pictures. In Picasa it is rather difficult to do that. For captions you have to go to each picture to add them and then hit Ctrl-K to be able to add some tags. Both will be embedded in the picture, which is nice, but this is very time consuming. In FotoAlbum you could do this for several pictures at once and you could also add and see several other EXIF, IPTC and XMP Metadata. It uses a SQLite database to keep track of everything, even on which disc you archived your pictures. It keeps the thumbnail image and when you asks to see that photo, it prompt you for the right media and copies that file back to your hard drive. The Pro version will set you back $39.95, but there is also a free version that has most of the nice things (but not the archiving functionality I was looking for).
FotoAlbum has also a batch renaming functionality in the Pro version, but it seems limited to what I need. I was lately using RenameMaster, a very nice and free file renaming utility from JoeJoe’s Software, but on the same comments of that blogpost from Lifehacker, I found a link to Siren, another free renaming utility, similar to RenameMaster, but with several improvements. It also works with variables that allows you to compose any naming convention you wish, using not only EXIF data, but also IPTC and XMP metadata and you could save your particular combinations under Favorites. You could use this one not only for pictures, but for any kind of files, including mp3′s and videos.

Now I do have a pretty good set of tools, and with my new PC -which has plenty of disc space available- I’m going to work on all these pictures and archive them properly!