When digital cameras replaced the good old 35mm, people began taking pictures like a certain race of tourists (I wont go into right now) making it free to take and view as many pictures as you wanted. The cost of printing and storing went down but organizing and backing up all these pictures became complex and timely. So if you're like me then you have about eight gagillion digital pictures on mutliple PC's, laptops and external drives that are all over the place or you've attempted to organize them with the conventional windows folder organized by date etc... and failed miserably!
I started looking into alternatives for organizing and arranging my photos so they're easily accessible and I can backup without duplication. After doing a lot of research into thrid party applications (five minutes of google and thirty minutes of listening to Jason waffle on about raw images and google apps) I decided to go with Picasa (picasa.google.com). As soon as you download it it'll scan your hard drive(s) for all pictures, videos and other media and place it into a library initially organizing by date and time (you can sort by name also but I prefer the date). As soon as it's done that you can start organizing by excluding or including additional folders to monitor; scan once, ignore and scan constantly.
Here's where it got fun for me; I began to tag my family and friends in a couple of the pictures. As soon as you have done one or two it starts scanning through your pictures automatically and adding them to people albums. The facial recognition of Picasa is very cool although it doesn't do so well on kids as their faces change more frequently over time.
Another great feature of Picasa is the gold star attributes you can add to your favorite pictures so you can create a highlight of a specific batch of photos and only view these (e.g."Mexico highlights" ignoring the random pictures of drunk people and blurred shots).
So that's Picasa as an overview but there are loads more options to organize and edit your photos. If you haven't got a good method for sorting out your online photos download this now!!
P.S. Always backup your photos!! (you can even back them up to Google's storage service which gives you about 200GB for $50 a year. With Picasa you can then synch up all your photos automatically to this site. It's great if you were to have a hard drive go bad or a fire!) If Jason recommends it then it must be a good thing!!
