Organize Your Digital Photos

There are many ways to organize digital photos, but it can be overwhelming. Here are a few ways to make it a bit easier.

1. Windows makes it easy - you can select a group of photos, right-click and choose to rename them. Choose a name, such as "Christmas 2009 Photos" and Windows will rename all of them with that name and a sequential number. Not my best choice - if you're like us, you take a few different sets of pictures before you download them from your camera. But, it is a free and simple option.

2. Windows Live, by Microsoft, has a FREE downloadable program called Windows Live Photo Gallery. It allows you to tag photos and find them quickly.

3. Siren - also does bulk renaming, while allowing you to search by lots of different information that is collected from the file. It's Freeware, downloadable software.

4. Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 - one of my favorites. It's a much cheaper version of Adobe Photoshop, but it still has many features of the full version. The newest version is very user friendly and adds an organizational element that makes it very easy to create a photo album that is searchable by a lot of different information collected from the file.

Try any of these (Adobe has a Free Trial) and see which one works best for you.