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The fastest way to add keywords!

Recommended Programs

IrfanView (free) is great for viewing your photos. We register .jpg and .tif file extensions so double clicking on photos in Windows Explorer launches IrfanView. You can do a lot with it besides viewing. We use IrfanView for batch renaming, deleting, viewing and getting Exif information. We use Shift+E to edit photos in Photoshop.

Microsoft Photo Info (free) allows you to edit and view metadata from Windows Explorer. You right click on one or more photos and choose Photo Info. It's a great way to add metadata to a multiple photos at once.

Adobe Photoshop is the ultimate photo editing program. Countless books are written about it. We use it to crop, resize, remove dust and red eyes, and for fancy edits. When we edit DNG files we save them as TIFF files. We leave JPGs as JPG unless we plan to do a lot of editing.

Adobe Bridge comes with Adobe's Creative Suite. It's handy for adding metadata to multiple files at once, like copyright information. We also use it to view DNG photos (as well as every other type of file). Ctrl+R launches the camera raw plug-in for non-destructive adjusting of the digital negative file's exposure, white balance and cropping. Ctrl+F enables you to find your photos by keywords.

Windows Explorer (part of Windows, App+E) is used to organize photos by photo shoots. We create folders for each year inside "My Pictures". Inside the year folders we create months, 1Jan, 2Feb, 3Mar, etc. Inside the months we create a folder for each batch of photos and give it a descriptive name like "wedding". In Vista you can search for files by keywords.

Adobe DNG Converter (free) converts your camera raw files to a Digital Negative Files (DNG). We now only shoot camera raw since it gives you much more control than shooting JPEG. After downloading the raw files from the camera to the folder we convert them to DNG and delete the original raw files. The DNG files are compressed (lossless) and are smaller. We specify that a full JPEG preview is stored in the DNG as well so Keypict can quickly display the files.

Microsoft SyncToy (free) backups your photos to other hard disks. We use the echo option so our master files are duplicated to match. Only new, changed, or deleted files are copied, saving a lot of time. We also backup to DVDs occasionally -- don't neglect this.

Keypict adds keywords to your photos. We use it after the deleting and editing steps.

Keypict Photo Search plug-in (free) indexes titles, descriptions and keywords from your photos so you can find them quickly using Google Desktop Search.

VueScan is a nice program for scanning. We recommend you save your scans as TIFF files so you can edit them multiple times without the artifacts sometimes introduced by JPEG compression.

Keypict Klondike (free) plays solitaire for you so you have time to add keywords to your photos.

Note About Database Photo Organizers

There are a lot of nice photo organizing programs available, for example: Google Picasa (free), Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop Album, Adobe Photoshop Elements, to mention a few. All these organizers use their own database to store information about your photos. When you tag a photo with a name, the information is stored in the database, not in the photo. Your tags are only visible when in your chosen organizer. Don't forget to backup the database along with your photos.

If you add keywords to the photo then add the photo to the organizer, some organizers will extract the keywords and add them to their database. If you add the photo to the organizer then add keywords to the photo, some organizers will detect that the photo has changed and update their database to reflex the new information. Some organizers have an option to update the specified photo manually. You need to determine what works for you.

If you want your files to "reflect the truth", some organizers allow you to write the database information back to the original files.

Keypict, Vista, Bridge, and Photoshop store keywords in the photo file so the file "reflects the truth" and the keywords are visible to all.