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The Taylor photographic archive straddles traditional film photography and digital imaging somewhat uneasily.
Most of the traditional images can be found quickly in a photo album or in transparency racks and cases. The digital images are spread across the hard drives of several family PCs and backed up on to Maxtor OneTouch external hard drives (www.maxton.com) and a Mirra Personal Server (www.mirra.com). At first, I managed to keep track of most by storing them in folders in the My Pictures folder that comes with Microsoft's Windows XP.
But as the number of images stored on the PCs grew rapidly, it was increasingly hard to organise and find individual images. Now help is at hand. Most consumer photo editing software suites, including my favourites -- Adobe's Photoshop Essentials (www.adobe.com), and Google's free Picasa software (www.picasa.com), now include tools to help organise a digital photo collection.
There are also more and more dedicated software "photo album" programmes designed to make it easier to manage and organise digital images and, for those who want an easy way to share their images, some excellent online services including Kodak EasyShare Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com), formerly known as Ofoto.
Some of these photo organisers, such as Paint Shop Photo Album, are companion products or spin-offs from image editing suites; others have been designed from scratch as digital photo albums.
I decided to take a closer look at the latest versions of some of the most popular digital image editing and photo album packages.
Although it is a relative newcomer to the market, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, which costs about $99, is one of the most powerful image editing packages around. Elements manages to combine many of the most important features of Adobe's flagship Photoshop package with remarkable ease of use. For example, it enables users to fix flash-induced red-eye, sharpen blurred images and lighten or darken images.
Elements includes just enough sophistication to keep advanced users happy, with special effects such as filters and layers, and yet is still accessible to novice users. If you are looking for a digital imaging package to grow with you, Adobe Photoshop Elements should be on the shortlist.
Corel's Paint Shop Pro 9 (www.corel.com) is another worthy contender, packing a tremendous amount of power into a $129 software package. Paint Shop Pro was slightly more difficult to learn than Elements, but it provides novices with a wide range of image improvement tools including "automatic photo fixes" to sharpen, brighten, and enhance photos fast.
Paint Shop also includes a Digital Camera Noise Removal feature to smooth the photo's texture, and Fill Flash/Backlighting Filters to bring out the details if lighting conditions are not good.
Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 10 (www.microsoft.com), which costs $129, lacks the sophistication of either the Adobe or Corel products but includes several features to facilitate organising and finding images. For example, as well as importing digital images directly from a camera it can scan a hard drive for images. Like most dedicated image management packages, it also allows users to assign keywords, star ratings and user-definable flags to individual images.
Highlighting once again the growing competition between Microsoft and Google, Version 2 of Google's Picasa photo editing suite also provides enhanced organisation features in addition to basic editing and photo sharing.
Google acquired Picasa last year, turned it into a free download and launched the latest version of the package in January. Aside from adding new capabilities such as lighting and colour effects and the ability to burn CDs, Picasa 2 scans stored images and sorts them by date.
As well as allowing users to add labels and star ratings to favourite images, Picasa 2 lets them keep pictures in multiple albums.
What makes photo management programmes most interesting is their ability to break away from hierarchical folders and let users see all their images in a single view no matter how many locations or hard drives they are stored on.
This also enables users to "tag" images with keywords or other data. The most popular dedicated digital programmes include Adobe Photoshop Album (bundled with Photoshop Elements), ACDSee 7 ($50), Corel Paint Shop Photo Album (about $25) and Microsoft Digital Image Library (bundled with Digital Image Suite).
Of these, I found ACD Systems' ACDSee 7 (www.acdsystems.com) the most impressive. Like other editing packages, ACDSee 7 enables users to perform the most common image editing tasks, such as cropping an image, adding effects or removing digital noise. It also includes a backup utility and an Acquire Wizard, which lets users quickly capture photos from most devices.
Once the images are on your PC, the software makes it easy to process and store photos in batches of any size and manage your image files. ACDSee 7 enables users to create new folders and modify an existing Windows folder structure, assign images to a special favourites folder, find duplicates and generate complete file listings.
A complete list of an image's properties including date, format, dimensions, camera metadata, personal captions, keywords, ratings, author and category can be viewed in the software's browser at any time and images can be sorted by any of these properties.
If you have an extensive digital image collection, ACDSee 7 is probably the best off-the-shelf image management system available at a bargain price.
If your requirements are more modest, other packages including Paint Shop Photo Album and Adobe Photoshop Album may be a better option.
For example, Photoshop Album makes it particularly easy to add a tag to an image and create new tags. A single image or multiple images can be tagged simply by dragging them from a thumbnail viewer to the appropriate category tag.
With tools like these, I have little excuse for not organising the Taylor digital image collection.
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