photo management offline for non techy person (advice?)

mystavash

Joined: 2004-09-12
Posts: 69
Posted: Mon, 2006-09-25 18:07

Hi, all!

My gallery chugs along fine these days, so it's been a while since I had anything to post about.

I have an older friend (my former host mother in Japan, to be precise) who wants to reorganize her hundreds of photos.

I personally don't use anything, I don't have a website for my personal photos yet, so I don't know much about this.

I looked at Picasa, but putting dates with labels seemed confusing and counterintuitive to me. Useful for events, but not for people.

Right now she has them sorted into rough categories (her own children, former students like myself, nature, etc), and then by date. Whenever she gets new pictures, she just makes a folder in the appropriate category and then plops them all in.

What she would like to do, I think, is reorganize everything from the ground up, and then continue to use that program. I am going to interpret this to mean the program should take the photos from their old folders and put them new ones, OR, perhaps better, she should leave her photos on the computer as they are, and focus on organizing photos inside the program. (what do you think?)

She simply wants to be able to organize things and find them easily. I don't think she wants to actually edit photos much, though she may be up to the occasional cropping.

I would say for an older lady, she is pretty savvy, she can use most programs and is a quick study, but she is definitely not a power user. I am looking for just a simple free program that is easy to use, free, available in Japanese, and will be around for a while. Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition (called mini in Japanese ;) seems the thing, but are there other programs that are good?

I'd appreciate any advice you have regarding her situation. I want to do all I can to help her. :)

Anisa.

 
cush
cush's picture

Joined: 2006-09-19
Posts: 15
Posted: Tue, 2006-09-26 20:32

The methode I use for now is putting new photos into folders named <date + topic>. That's an quite easy solution to be able to sort them chronologically. While Picasa has a nice handling in general, the sorting of the pictures with dates like you mentioned is not userful for me either. I like the possibility of tagging the pictures with meaningful keywords -- but doing this for thousands of pictures is a pain of course :)

What I absolutely dislike with other software products is the requirement of importing -- in the meaning of copying -- pictures into their databases/stocks. Picasa only indexes found files.

If you find any good software solution I would be happy to hear ...

cush

--
serving bits since ever!