Continued from here.

The one thing people cite when talking about why they prefer digital photography over film is the fact that you can shoot as much as you want without having to worry about the expense of film. This is true, but back when digital cameras first became available, digital media was expensive enough that when you were out on the road, it was likely you still had to keep track of how much space was left on your card, avoiding extra shots and deleting photos you knew were bad. You’d get your camera home after a day out, download the photos onto your desktop, lovingly rename and date the files, sorting them into well-thought-out folders. It was a labor of love, but one that you’d do gladly because it never took that long.

These days it’s a different story. (Click here to keep reading)With multi-gigabyte cards the norm and image files relatively small (compared to video, for example), it’s pretty common to shoot a TON of photos in one outing. You get home, pop your media card into the laptop, grab a latte while 2 gigabytes of photos download into a single folder all with names like DSC_09345.JPG, sip on your coffee a few more minutes while the computer creates thumbnails, and then… what? How do you begin to think about all of this stuff? How do you even begin to sort through it all? What kinds of folder names do you use? What about these impossible to figure out filenames? What to do?!?

The problem with digital photography these days is that the equipment is far more powerful than our little brains can handle. Our cameras are miniaturized supercomputers, churning out data at a rate that we can’t even begin to deal with. In the end, we have to stop thinking of our cameras in the same way we thought about our cameras of yesterday. We have to treat them like the computers they are and begin to use them like computers.

Wait, wait… hold on. Before you close the browser and walk away in disgust, I’d like to take a second and let you know that I’m not suggesting we all become computer hackers just so that we can get a few decent shots of the kids. What I am saying is that we can’t expect to keep up with all of the information, so we need to use the tools we’ve got to help us out. And here’s the great thing… most of the best tools are either right on your computer already or are free and easy to download. Seriously.

Tomorrow on Keeping Track of Everything… Getting Your Geek On.