Photo Management vs. Photo Editing

In my last post I wrote about dipping into Photoshop. But long before we even get to photo editing we should talk about photo management, because there is a HUGE difference. With digital cameras having been in the mainstream for almost a decade there hundreds and often thousands of images in any one person's library. When was the last time you looked through your images to see what you have and where you've been?

The idea of photo management is that you sort, group and share your photos. Even the best photographers don't have perfect photos with every shot. They go through their shoots and decide which pictures are junk, which ones are worth taking a second look at and which photos are definitely the keepers and will be sent to Photoshop for further editing to make them perfect.

There are several ways of going about this task. I'll go over some options in order of price point. Let's start with FREE.

Google has made a pretty good piece of software called Picasa that works almost seamlessly with you Gmail and Blogger. It's completely free and you don't even need a Google account to get it.

Picasa will search through all of your computer (or just the folders you want if you prefer) and will load them into folders. From these Picasa will search for faces and uses some pretty advanced computing to find all the similar faces so you can created groupings of photos of the same person. Pretty cool. It will also let you so some basic editing like red-eye removal and brightness/contrast.

For being free this software is really a good deal. If you're not using anything to help you keep track of your pics. Give it a look. You just might find it handy.

Tomorrow: iPhoto and Photoshop Elements