Photo Hygiene – maximizing enjoyment of your Digital Picture Frame and photo assets

We have a concept here at PhotoVu we've coined – “Photo Hygiene." Like its counterpart in life, some people have it and some people don't. However, it's absolutely critical to practice good photo hygiene to extract the most enjoyment out of your digital photo frame and digital photo assets. And no, we are not talking about the H1N1 virus, cold, germs or flu!

There are several things that we fell fall into good Photo Hygiene:

1. Get those digital images immediately off your camera: Make sure to always copy off those precious photos off your camera as soon as you come home from a trip or event. Think, what if you lost your camera and had several months of more of digital pictures on them – they would be now gone forever.

2. Delete bad photos: This one only came to me over a long, long time. PhotoVu's unlimited photo playing potential makes it very easy to just dump all your photos from your camera to the hard drive, which in turn will automatically get picked by the PhotoVu and become part of your every day life. It's just so easy to “dump and run.” However, do you really need those 5x shots of that one special moment of your kid doing X? No, of course not. Pick the best one and delete the rest. This issue of having so many “like duplicate” photos doesn't tend to show its downside when in random mode, as they get mixed up quite a bit, so as not to be so annoying. However, when you decide one day to mix it up and try our “play in-order” option, it can be a real drag to see the same “like-photo” 8 times in a row.

3. Backup, Backup, Backup: This is self explanatory. Your backups should include at least two USB hard drives – one at your home/office and another one at a remote location. Also, a set of DVD backups – again, one at your home/office and another at a remote location.

4. Organization and file naming methodology: This is a huge one, and really deserves a whole separate post of its own (actully several posts), as it could take quite a few pages to cover in detail. Basically, it's what file name you give each digital image when it is transferred from your camera to the hard drive on your computer. Don't confuse this with photo management software that has its own whole ogranizational structure, often inside a separate database inside its program. We will have several future posts on 3^rd party photo management programs (iPhoto, Adobe, Picasa, etc.) No, what we are suggesting is, that outside whatever photo management software you may or may not use, that you take an additional step and rename your photos at the file system level of whatever host computer system you may be using (Mac or PC for instance). In this way, you are not tied down to any one particular photo management program and then your photos will then be ogranized at the core computer's filesystem level.

   For instance, most cameras will have some simple naming convention that puts them in some folder, like 100, 102, etc., then name each file, like 102-1001.jpg, 102-1002.jpg – which is just not very useful. It's much more useful if you have some kind of structured renaming convention so that each unique photo's filename actually means something. That means that each image file downloaded from your camera will have to be renamed as it comes from the camera and is stored onto the computer's hard drive, which can be a very laborious task.

   Maybe you want to organize by year, month and event. In this example, you would have a folder for every year, and inside that folder, you would have a separate folder for each month, and then each event (wedding, birthday, weekend trip to X), would get its own folder, then the pictures would go into the final event folder with whatever photo file ID the camera natively gave it (145-1744.jpg).

   Maybe you want to organize your folders and pictures even more granually, for example – by year, month, day, and photo file name ID from the camera ((102-1451.jpg). There are just so many options that no one solution will satisfy every way people think is best. The point is to pick one renaming methodolgy that works for you and stick to it, so it is consistent and provides a useful system to find that one photo or event you may be looking for in the future.

   For us at PhotoVu, based mostly on the way the PhotoVu wireless digital picture frame just works, we like to organze very simply. We create a folder for the year and then every picture taken for that year will go into its corresponding year folder, and each photo's unique file name will be renamed to look like and include the following: year- month-day-hour-minute-second-unique camera image number-camera model numer. jpg. For instance, here is random filename from my image collection: 2009-03-25-090608-0271-SD880 IS.jpg

   This renaming and creating the filename above would be a huge laborious task if it wasn't for a great small and amazing camera file remaning utility program we found and use every day here at PhotoVu. It's called Downloader Pro from Breeze Systems Limited, available at http://www.breezesys.com/Downloader/index.htm. It's worthy to note that we have absolutely no affiliation with this company and they do not even know we are blogging about them. However, simply put, we can not say enough great things about this little file renaming program, and we hightly recommend it. Try out their free evaluation for yourself and let us know if you agree with us, that's it's the best way to rename your photos right out of your camera and onto your hard drive, with whatever file renaming convention that works best for you.