How to organize pictures in the PC?

[Ivo]

There has to be a better way than just creating massive structures of folders within folders with several shortcuts. I guess I'm too old school in that.

What do you use? My main issue is pictures that belong in several places. For example, a picture of me taken in a my hometown, during a Christmas should be in the Christmas folder, in the Ivo folder, and in the hometown folder... But just creating shortcuts everywhere is really clunky.

I presume Picasa does this and I tried, but I don't like Picasa too much as by default it seems to start catalogs of all pictures without asking me where I want it to work and I feel like I'm not in control of what is happening there (IMO I should decide where I want Picasa to get pics, instead it seems that I must manually tell Picasa where it should NOT get pics from).

Suggestions?

Ivo.

[csvo2000]

I love love love Picassa.

1. Its Free
2. Allows you to tag your pics so if you want pictures of roses, all you have to do is type roses and bingo there you go.
3. You can tell it what folders you dont want it to show you or hide.
4. It gives you a basic photo fixing secxtion that lets you fix 99% of what you need.
5. Stable, I dont think its ever frozen on me.

[CRTGAMER]

I have a Camera folder with subfolders for each year's JPGs and MPGs in the D drive. I use names such as JPG 2009 and MPG 2009. For vacation shots maybe another folder called JPG 2006 Hawaii.

A JPG 2010 folder with a hundred names such as "photo134.jpg" is meaningless. The monotonous chore of renaming the individual picture files is simplified by doing that every time you empty that camera memory card. Annual backup to CDRs and DVDRs to relatives are a great way to preserve your archive.

For a very quick pic view I use good old non bloated PC version ACDSee. Its fast loading with a great preview and slide show. I love the way the scroll wheel zips thru the full screen pics!