This information is Copyright January 2006 by
http://www.santaclausca.com and Loring Windblad. References for
this article include the author's personal knowledge and
experience. Additional information references with first
article. This article may be freely copied and used on other web
sites only if it is copied complete with all links and text,
including this header, intact and unchanged except for minor
improvements such as misspellings and typos.
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
SweetieBDay1-1-01-0001x.jpg 34 kb for the web
SweetieBDay1-1-01-0001xy.jpg 3.2 kb for email
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