Recently I’m reminded that many of you have digital cameras. I also know from previous experience that, once you have taken the photos, you have no idea what to do with them.

Handle Your Photos

Just like our good friend John says above, your camera is not the best place to store your photos. I mean, why look at those old pictures on that tiny screen of your camera when you can upload them to your computer and view them on the screen or easily get them printed? Let’s jump right in!

This is going to be geared toward you Windows users among us. But many of things we are going to discuss, like getting prints made, will work for anyone.

The first thing you need to do is find a way to suck your photos off of your camera to your computer, keep them organized and be able to do some light processing on them (cropping, red eye removal, color adjustments). If you have anything installed on your PC now that contains the words Sony, Adobe, Kodak or Roxio along with the word(s) photo, picture or image, go into the control panel and uninstall them. While some people may like them, I find they are too complicated, move your photos to odd places on your hard drive and usually not terribly stable.

Done? Good! Now, go over to google.com/picasa and click the download button. Once downloaded, click run and let it install. VERY IMPORTANT. You will see 2 screens once Picasa is installed. One of them is to let it handle all of your images. Leave that one alone. The other will be asking you where you want Picasa to look for images. Unless you want to see every image on your computer (including those from your internet cache), I highly recommend selecting the Desktop and Documents option. Once that is done, Picasa will start building a database that contains all of the photos on your desktop and in your photo folder.

Easy right?

As soon as the database build is complete, plug your camera into your computer either by the supplied USB cable or by inserting the memory card into a slot on the front/side. Picasa should open automatically and ask to import those photos to your computer. Go ahead. Heck, you can even let it delete the photos when you are done. No, really, it’s ok.

Now that your photos are organized and easily accessible in Picasa, spend more than a few minutes poking around to see what it can do. Don’t worry about making changes to anything because Picasa, much like iPhoto on the Mac, does non-destructive edits. That means no matter what you do to a photo, you can always revert back to the original.

How about some prints to show those photos off to friends and family? This one is equally easy and there are more than a few ways to do it.

You can burn the photos you want prints of to a CD and take them to your local CostCo and they will happily print them for you. Good quality, fast turn around and not too expensive. You can also go to Walgreens.com, upload the photos you want printed and pick them up at your local Walgreens Drug Store. Again, good quality, fast turn around and not to expensive. Not to mention super duper easy!

The only thing left is backing those photos up! I’m gonna hammer on you about this until the end of time, you know that, right? I don’t care if you email yourself the most important documents and photos, get an external drive or sign-up for an account at Carbonite, just make it happen, ok?

Comments are open if you have any questions! Myself and the rest of the donburnside.com readers would love to help!

Happy 4th of July! Be safe and sane out there. If you can’t manage that, at least blow something up with enough explosives to leave a good sized divot in the backyard.