cumulus

Anyone reading my Blatherings knows that I take a lot of digital photos. I carry my Canon Elph PowerShot S100 everywhere with me; it's so small that I can stick it in a purse or pocket. On a typical day at the cottage, I'll take at least 40-50 photos.

My digital photo collection has grown exponentially since 2000, when we first bought our cameras (Jeff has one, too!). I've been storing the photos in chronological order by year and month and sometimes event, but because I don't take the time to rename all my photos, I can never tell what's in a photo unless I open up the file.

I've been using iView MediaPro to browse my images, but unfortunately iView doesn't search very well, and only opens one folder at a time. This is a major pain when looking for a particular photo, since the only way I'll be able to find it is if I know approximately when I took it (so I can look in the appropriately-named folder) or if I've posted it on Blatherings.

I'm reaching the point where I know I have to switch to a more efficient method, or I'll end up with many gigs' worth of digital images I can't easily access. Jeff suggested a program called Cumulus, by Canto.





I downloaded the demo and PDF user manual, tried it out. The demo has all the features of the full version, but limits you to two catalogs and 50 images. VERY cool program. It organizes other types of files as well, not just photos. After playing with it about an hour or two, I bought a registration key (US$89.95).

I'm going to gradually cull and categorize all my photos, starting with the present and working my way backward. One of things I really like about the software is that you can assign multiple categories or descriptions to multiple images at the same time.

I've created my categories in terms of what kind of search queries I'd be making. One category is Family, with subcategory of Ohi and sub-sub-categories of my dad, Ruth, Kaarel, Sara and Annie. Whenever I download a new batch of photos, I just select all the photos with Annie in them, select the "Annie" category and then "Attach Selected Categories". This means that anytime I want to see all the photos with Annie in them, I just select the "Annie" category.

I can finetune my search by specifying a specific date range, or add other search criteria. The search function is extremely flexible, with lots of boolean possibilities. If I wanted to, for example, could search for all the pictures of Zoë, for example, which were taken at Disneyland and that contain Amanda but not Scott. And of course, I could search for specific text in the picture description.

Looking forward to learning more about this program.

Hope you're all enjoying your long weekend!





Links/Update:

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Today's Blatherpics:

The following photos were taken yesterday evening, at my sister's place. Sara and Annie have invented their own version of Quidditch, the game in Harry Potter.

	Sara with the blodger, ducking around Christopher, a neighbourhood boy. The evening light was somewhat dim but I opted not to use the flash, following Sara's motion instead. The results were kind of cool, I thought.
	Annie, the beater, protecting the goal.
	Sunflower in my sister's garden.