Digital cameras have become ubiquitous, thanks to the little one built right into your cell phone, and they are fast approaching the image quality of compact digital cameras. According to one estimate, mankind has taken more than 3.5 trillion photos till date, and as much as 10% of those were taken in the last twelve months alone. That’s a lot of photos, and it is pretty evident that there is a substantial chunk on everyone’s computer.
So, how do you organize your digital pictures? Do you keep them in separate folders based on event, such as ‘Kathy’s birthday’ and ‘Europe vacation’, or do you keep them on folders named by date the pictures were taken on? Do you dump them all in a single folder?
About two years ago we looked at some of the available tools that help you organize and intelligently rename your picture collection. We’ll pick up from where we left, and introduce you to another two excellent tools that lets you rename and organize your collection.
Adebis Photo Sorter
With a simple and unambiguous interface, Adebis Photo Sorter allows you to quickly turn a completely disorganized photo collection of any size into a neat set of folders containing relevant photos grouped according to the rules you define.
At the top of the program window you select the source folder – the one where your pictures reside. Immediately below, you select the destination folder – where you want the organized pictures to go. Here you define how you want the program to create sub-folders. The typical choices are Year\Month, Year\Month\Date, Year\Month-date and so on. You can also create your own rules. Furthermore, you can group pictures by days or week.
If you want to reorganize pictures taken only between two particular dates, you can do that too.
Finally, there is file renaming option that can rename your picture files again by date, time or both. Naming rules are also configurable.
Adebis Photo Sorter supports a large number of file types. Aside from JPEG and TIFF, it supports RAW files such as DNG (Adobe), NEF, NRW (Nikon), CR2 (Canon); ARW (Sony), PEF (Pentax), ORF (Olympus), RW2, RAW (Panasonic).
WIA-Loader
I never use the picture importing utility digital camera manufacturers supply along with the camera. It’s almost always bulky and tries to do stuff with my pictures that I don’t want to. I prefer to manually copy pictures from the camera to my hard drive via Windows Explorer, even though it means extra work for me. And if I do need a software, I use WIA-Loader.
WIA-Loader is an excellent tool that lets you import pictures from your digital camera into user-defined folders organized by date and/or keywords, and rename them, in one swoop. Whether you plug in your digital camera using the supplied USB cable or use a memory card reader to transfer pictures, WIA-Loader will always detect it.
Before you start transferring pictures, you must create a transfer profile where you define how you want the pictures copied and organized. There is a benefit of using profiles - you can quickly switch from one set of settings to another, which is handy if you work with multiple cameras or multiple clients.
During transfer, WIA-Loader will rotate upright pictures automatically, set the pictures to be read only, geocode images with GPS information or tag images with keywords. If you check the Options dialog box, you will find extensive configuration settings to tweak the program’s behavior.
WIA-Loader supports all common image type including RAW files of every major and minor camera manufacturer.
Drawback: If you shoot both JPEG+RAW, WIA-Loader will import only the JPEG images. It would have been great if the program could import both into different folders.
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