Computer Corner with Mrs PC
August 2013
Photography.
Summer holidays
are here at last and it is a great chance to relax with family and friends or
go away on holiday. Many people enjoy
taking photos on holiday, using a camera or phone, but a lot of people struggle
with actually viewing, storing, printing or sharing them. However in my opinion, the point of taking
them is lost if you never look at them or can’t find them, or don’t know how to
email or use them!
My advice is to
load up your photos from your camera or phone regularly into a monthly
subfolder, and use sub folders each time you load a new selection of photos if
you take a lot. Try not to store 400+ photos
on your memory card. It is heartbreaking
to lose them if you lose your camera. Even
losing 20 is bad enough if they are special don’t you think?
Each time I upload
photos to my computer, I also do an extra back up of photos online and
sometimes I also back them up to an external hard drive. Then wipe my camera memory (or SD) card clean
and start again. This ensures I never
end up with a jumble of photos from several different occasions in one folder,
and also ensures that if I lose my camera, I won’t lose all my photos as well.
I find it easier
to find my photos if I name each folder and put the date on it. Then I can use the search tool to find photos
quickly.
Once photos are on
the computer, it is then easy to email them to friends, post them onto Facebook
or share with Dropbox. You can also use
your own photos to make personalized greetings cards or postcards.
If you like to
print your photos, you can take your memory card to a photo booth and print
them all or a selection of them or you can upload them online and get them
printed by various online printing companies.
Photo books make lovely presents and are fun to make online. It takes time to organise the photos and get
them where you want them, but the effort is very worthwhile.
Using your photos,
you can make T-shirts, mugs, key rings, jigsaws, mousemats, canvass prints (which
look amazing) or posters. Calendars make
Christmas presents if you are thinking ahead!
So if you have an
image that you are really proud of, use it and enjoy it!
Alternatively, if
you have some old photos that are precious and you want to preserve them or
share them with others, you could scan them in to your computer.
If you have taken
a less than perfect photo, but it is precious, all is not lost as you can use
an editing programme to help you to fix the problems. Adobe Photoshop is the professional one, but
expensive and complicated. There are
lots of free solutions to fixing things like redeye from a flash photo or a
power line through a stunning landscape photo.
So don’t let
taking a photo be the end of your creativity!
There are so many enjoyable projects that you could be immersed in. Don’t despair about the photos you already
have on your computer which are jumbled and messy. It doesn’t take long to bring order into
chaos, and is a really worthwhile job!
Just one more
thing- Mrs PC suggests that you all check your cameras to make sure the date
and time are set correctly on there.
This will make sorting your photos a whole lot easier and help your
computer to stay organized.
