Organizing Digitals Archives • Scan Your Entire Life

Photoshop + Lightroom for $9.99/mo. — Adobe’s Limited Time Photographer’s Offer

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Apr 21, 2017 | Organizing Digitals, Restoring Digitals

If you’re a photo enthusiast who uses, or has even thought about using both Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom, you might want to at least consider this deal that Adobe is still offering — but not for long!

For $9.99 a month, when you sign up a one-year plan, you will have ongoing access to the latest versions of both Photoshop CC (Creative Cloud) and Lightroom (currently version 5) via their new Creative Cloud subscription model. This is not an introductory price.

But don’t spend too long deciding if this is right for you — this deal is only being honored until December 31, 2013.

Honestly, I’m thinking about signing up for this.

How to Change a Photo’s Date in Picasa to When the Photo Was Taken

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Apr 21, 2017 | Organizing Digitals

It’s very likely there are a bunch of photos in your Picasa photo collection that are displaying the incorrect date and time when the photos were actually taken.

And this isn’t just a problem when your photos won’t sort chronologically, this will also be an issue for you every time you create a new folder or album and it constantly tries to use the wrong date.

Maybe the date and time weren’t set correctly in your digital camera before you took these photos. Or it’s possible you scanned a bunch of paper prints or film negatives and the dates are still incorrectly reflecting the date you did the scanning.

Either way, you’ll be happy to know as of version 3.5 of Picasa (changelog), you now have the ability to easily correct the date and time of your pictures and videos using the following steps.

All My Pictures in iPhoto Disappeared! How to Safely Get Them Back

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Mar 8, 2021 | Organizing Digitals

iPhoto is so good at protecting your precious photos, that in those very rare times when something actually does go wrong, it’s hard not to just freak out and think you really have lost all of your photos!

Luckily in situations like this, you are able to recall some clues that could make you realize your photos are actually still on your computer. It’s just that you can’t figure out how to get them to show up again in iPhoto.

This is exactly what happened to Abdullah and his iPhoto collection.

The Benefits of Recording Your 35mm Slide’s Exposure Number

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Apr 21, 2017 | Organizing Digitals, Scanning Photos

Did you ever notice those little 2-digit numbers printed at the top of your 35mm slides?

I have to keep in mind some of you reading this may have never even touched a roll of film in your life!

It’s scary for guys like me to think that’s even possible, but it really is since we live in a time when digital cameras have been affordable since about 2000.

For the uninitiated, [cough] when you shot pictures that would be developed as those little plastic or cardboard slides you later projected onto a large screen for family viewings, you used a special roll of film in your camera.

One of the choices you had to make when picking out a box of film was how many exposures you wanted.

How to Get iPhoto to Store Your Photos Inside or Outside of the iPhoto Library (Managed vs. Referenced)

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated May 29, 2017 | Organizing Digitals

If you’re an iPhoto user, have you ever wondered to yourself where your original photo files are actually stored on your computer?

I mean, you know they’re stuffed in there somewhere. You just honestly haven’t really seen them with your own eyes in a long time.

I can’t think of anything that should be more important to an iPhoto user than knowing where they are really saved.

In fact, it’s so important that I decided to put together a nice little tutorial video explaining these basics.

This is the foundation of how iPhoto works.

How to Date Photos When Even Your Family Can’t Remember Them!

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated May 5, 2020 | Organizing Originals, Organizing Digitals

Q&A: A couple of years ago, I started organizing my digital photos the way you showed in your naming scanned photos post, instead of by subject, etc.

I’m just now starting to archive all the photos my Mom has. As we are taking them out of the albums (which, by the way, I hate those old “magnetic” albums–the photos stick to the pages), she is telling me who is in the pictures, etc.

Most of the ones we are doing now are the real old ones–her family photos and my Dad’s family photos. Some are dated and/or have captions to help identify them, but several don’t.

The problem is she can’t always narrow down the date enough to come up with a year. So that’s causing me to have a lot of photos with ’19xx-xx-xx’ as the date. There aren’t really any other family members who will know the answer so I doubt if the dates will ever be completed.

Any suggestions as to how to handle situations like this so I don’t have a long list of ’19xx’ photos?

If You Don’t Add This to the Filename of Your Scanned Photos, You’ll Probably Hate Yourself Later

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated Apr 21, 2017 | Scanning Photos, Featured Post, Organizing Digitals

Whether you keep all of your scanned master (original) image files in folders on a hard drive, or you allow an image manager like Picasa, iPhoto or Aperture to manage them inside a library file, you will still be required to give each photo a filename.

It could be as simple and non-descriptive as “photo-1.jpg” or maybe even simple yet somewhat descriptive like “mom at the beach 1984.tif”.

But, it’s actually a very important part of the process of scanning photos, that if done with a little bit of forethought, can save you a lot of time and headache later.

How to Get Your Photos Out of iPhoto With Your Titles and Descriptions Intact

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated May 29, 2017 | Organizing Digitals

A reader writes, “Hi, Firstly, thank you for your tips about adding descriptions in your post ‘The Best Way to Add a Description (Caption) to Your Scanned Photos.’ I tried what you suggested with iPhoto (’11), but the description was not exported to Preview and it wasn’t included in emailed photos.”

Hey Carol, thanks for your comment! And you know I bet there are a lot of people having this problem, so let me try and shed some light on this.

You bring up a shortcoming that I think iPhoto has — well really, a lot of the image managers and photo editors. I mean Apple makes it so easy to change the titles (names) of your photos and add descriptions (captions) to them, but it seems anytime you want to do something with these titles and descriptions, well… you can’t.

The problem is iPhoto and a lot of photo managers appear to be a little stingy with the information you type into them. It almost seems like they are afraid that at any moment, you are going to consider jumping ship and leave them for a different photo manager, so they make it harder than it should be for you to get all of your hard work out from it.

The good news is there are ways to get your photos and descriptions out, you just have to do it in the few ways iPhoto allows you to. It’s basically the equivalent of as asking, “pretty please?”

The Best Way to Add a Description (Caption) to Your Scanned Photos

by Curtis Bisel | Last updated May 17, 2017 | Organizing Digitals, Featured Post

Ah, there’s nothing quite like reading a great caption to go along with a special photograph. Sometimes they’re so effective, they just seal the emotional experience of being there—as if you were right there when that photograph was taken—even if you weren’t!

I think it’s so important that you record these “priceless” descriptions as soon as you can. Some of us might think we can remember all of the details. But face it, you probably won’t be able to. They’re fleeting. And even if you could, you and your memory aren’t going to be on this earth forever.

With prints, it was easy to record this information by writing the stories by hand on the back. But, now that we are wishing to move our prints, slides and negatives to a digital form in our computer, how do we easily add this information so that it can live with each master image file?