The title of this article is actually Digital Photography: Using Windows XP (to manage your digital pictures). If you have read my previous articles, Digital Photography: The Basics and Digital Photography: Choosing Your Camera, you have a pretty good idea that all of a sudden one trip can really put a lot of megabytes onto your computer hard disk.
Just as an example here, if I shoot 20 still images (JPGs) I will be adding about 16-17 MB of pictures to my collection. If I shoot 1 minute of .AVI video clip that alone is about 14 MB of data. So 10 minutes of video runs about 145 MB. You have a 128 MB memory chip? Well, better go to 256 MB and a couple of them. If you're doing lots of video, get more. So 10 minutes of video and 30 pictures takes up 170 MB. It only takes about 6 of these sessions to put a whole gigabyte of pictures on your HD! You're gonna take a trip for 2 weeks? Someplace you've never been before? You had better take along about 5-6 or more extra 512 MB memory chips. You came home and you've got 3 gigabytes of pictures and video to sort and store and prepare for the web? And take selected pictures and make photo prints of them for your photo album? WOW! HELP! Well, that's what I'm here for.
Let's take a look at our old computers. They were 1.1 gHz AMD Duron CPUs with 2 each 60 GB HD's and Windows 2000...and we were running out of space. Both HD's were partitioned*. My sweetie and I have one computer each, twins of one another, and networked for file sharing, etc. Well, they got old (3 years, 4 now) and so 31 December a year ago we built new ones. These are 3200 AMD Athlon-64s with 1 gb of RAM, 2 each 160 gb of HD, Windows XP SP2 and most of the basic bells and whistles. Further, the first HD, with the O/S, is partitioned, but the second HD is not partitioned, giving us a single 160 GB "work space" to edit videos and movies and etc.
Partitioning your HD is not important to your digital photography and your digital or film camera. But it is important to how you handle and store and work with your digital images when you put them onto your computer. First, as a minimum, you should have at least two partitions. They would be C, D and E. Then you would have your second HD, un-partitioned, as F.
Your C partition would be about 15-20 GB and it would hold your installed O/S and all your installed operating programs - and nothing else! Your D partition would be about the same and it would hold all your email files. Your E partition would be the rest of your work, all the things you create and save, letters, pictures, designs, writing, etc. And your F would be un-partitioned to provide the maximum sized workspace you can have for manipulating your digital picture files, making movies, etc. It would also provide, if you wanted it, a backup of your C partition.
Example: You are hit by a virus, you cannot clean it as there is no cure out for it yet and it will destroy your computer the moment you boot your system. If you use any of your programs you will begin infecting other things. Your only solution is to format your C partition. If you only have one partition on your HD, this means you have now lost everything you had on your computer and must start over. If you have partitioned it as above you will only lose your installed programs and Windows. You can format it, copy the backup from your F drive and you are back in business - and no virus.
Remember in the previous articles that we went to http://www.santaclausca.com twice and checked for two different things about the video clips? Well, what you need to know about them is this (dealing with only the second one, the video CD). It is approximately 23 MB on the web - and on my HD. That's BIG you say? Yes....and no. Yes, it is pretty big. But no, its also actually pretty small. Lets take a look at just how it was created and how big - or small - it really is!
First, all versions of Windows came with a sound recorder; Windows XP is no different in that respect. But Windows XP SP2 also comes with a Windows Movie Maker. It makes movies for you in .WMV format - Windows Media Video. And it makes those movies from either video clips or still jpg clips or a combination of video and still images. Finally it will use either .AVI or .MPG video and probably just about any stills, including .JPG and .GIF all scrunched into one final video output.
But that's just the icing on the cake. It will also play the audio you had as part of your video clips as part of the final output and you can add in your own audio clips made in the Sound Recorder. You can also add in MP3 music clips and possibly even MIDI (MP2) audio clips, and make them a part of your .WMV presentation. You just have to be a little careful not to overlap your audio portions. Finally you can add in titling on your finished video production, especially helpful if you are making a slide presentation.
OK, back to my Santa video. I used two 1-minute video clips and a couple which were shorter. The 1-minute clips were 14+ mb each. The shorter ones were 2, 4 and 5 mb. And I used several stills at 500 kb each. Then I added a couple of audio .WAV clips at a couple of megabytes each! The total was about 45 megabytes and I was aghast! But, well, I did it, I liked it (finally), and so I saved it. I figured that Windows Movie Maker would create something larger than the composite parts - a very reasonable supposition, ordinarily! Much to my surprise, the resultant .WMV production came in at a slim, trim and svelte 23 MB! Voila! I was impressed. It also runs 3½ minutes of play time.
So what we're looking at here is a working file which has, just for this production, nearly 50 mb of files, and an additional 23 mb of final production - actually 3 copies. Close to 110 mb total in this one file! This is why I have a 160 gb HD that is un-partitioned. This is just my "working folder for this Santa video clip"; every piece of my work goes into its own individual folder.
On my HD I have a Digital Pictures folder and it holds almost all of my digital pictures. It will hold all of them as soon as I get them all arranged and sorted and filed properly. Right now that Digital Pictures folder holds 9.15 gb of digital files, audio, video and still. I have a second section for Music where I store all of my MP3 music and .WAV music files. It occupies 16.7 gb of music, but there are another 8 gb of mp3 music stored on CD and not on my HD. I also have another 4.07 gb of digital video in .VOB format, which is my digital 8 videos converted from digital 8 format to a usable Windows format. These are the four video presentations I produced for a third party and the represent only 2 ½ hours of video footage.
If we look at the Digital Pictures folder we find it has sub-folders for every trip we have made, for pictures I have converted from photographs to digital to use on the internet, from our backyard in bloom and in snow to fishing, fossil hunting to gold panning. And I have a Family folder which is subdivided to 22 different sub-folders Altogether my digital pictures folder contains 14,888 files and 277 sub-folders.
What I suggest for your digital picture storage is a similar system of filing. 1) Take if off your C partition. 2) Provide as many folders as you will need and label each appropriately so that you can find what you are looking for when you need it. 3) Add new folders as they are needed, with appropriate folder names. 4) Finally, and probably first, make sure that you correctly label each picture with a short name and date before you put it in its final file folder.
OK, you have your picture files all organized on your HD, you are ready to make movie presentations using your sound recorder and movie editor in Windows, and you even have an idea for a family web site to display all your pictures. Oooops! You just can't load 9 GB of pictures onto the internet. It would take you forever to upload them, it would cost you a fortune to host a web site with that much space used, and it would take visitors forever just to view a couple of pictures - even at modern ADSL speeds? So each picture you propose sending via email, and each picture you are going to use in your web site, needs to be processed and reduced. Pictures you send by email or upload to a web site should be no larger than 50 kb and shooting for 20-25 kb each is desirable. Even if you achieve a 25 kb average, if your web site holds 100 pictures that comes out to 2.5 mb. Just try sending 2.5 mb by email - it takes a little while to send and it takes a little while to receive and download, even by ADSL. And if you are on standard hotmail or yahoo mail your limit is 1 mb per message or thereabouts.
So your final step for preparing your files, jpg, that is, is to "reduce" them for web and email use. There are several programs out there, including some freeby programs, which will do this admirably.
Picassa is a free program from Yahoo which organizes your pictures on your computer and prepares them for email attachments. How well it prepares them for web use I don't know...I tend to do this myself so I know what and where everything is.
Adobe Photoshop is not a free program but it does come with a second internal program which is very useful. It's called Image Ready and with it I can process 20 pictures in about 20 minutes or less, including renaming them, color correcting them and reducing them from 800 kb to 20-45 kb and filing them back beside the original pictures.
Whatever name I use to identify the picture I simply add an "x" to it when I save it. This "x" tells me that I have reduced the image size and quality. If I also "crop" the picture I add "xy" to the end of the name. This tells me it has been color corrected, reduced and cropped. As an example, these labels would be something like:
SweetieBDay1-1-01-001.jpg 865 kb original in full resolution
SweetieBDay1-1-01-001x.jpg 34 kb for the web
SweetieBDay1-1-01-001xy.jpg 3.2 kb for email
About the Author
Loring Windblad worked as a freelance photographer for more than 20 years. He and his wife presently own and regularly use 1 VHS camcorder, 2 digital 8 camcorders and two digital still cameras, as well as a standard 35mm SLR. His latest business endeavor is at: http://www.santaclausca.com.
