The Chronicles
November 2009
Salutations dear readers and fellow Laurentian neighbors,
Establishing a good filing system, be it for photos / documents / music, etc ... is a lot like drawing one's own personal Family Tree, except that instead of going from top (great-great grandparents) to bottom (your children), it goes from left to right. It is important to know this because when you want to create a Folder, then a sub-folder then a sub-sub-folder etc ... you must know which “parent” folder you want its sub-folder to go into and therefore know how to visually understand your computer's Filing System.
Up to this point the Folder “Pictures” contains our “2_Organize” sub-folder which contains our renamed photos (eg. Cuba_0902(1), Cuba_0902(2) ... Cuba_0902(312)). We are now going to create a home for these photos.
Start (click) / Pictures (click). Make sure “Pictures” has a blue rectangle around it to ensure that the sub-folder will be placed in the correct Folder. Next, in XP, click the File Menu / New / Folder; in Vista, click the Organize Menu / New Folder. You now see a new folder, named “New Folder” in “Pictures”. Name this Folder
eg. Vacations and press Enter when you're finished in order to accept your new name. Now make a sub-folder in Vacations named “Down_South”. This name is vague enough that this Folder can not only contain your Cuba photos but equally any other photos you may take over the years when visiting Mexico or the Dominican Republic or Jamaica.
Now we are finally ready for the last step of this organizational process which consists of moving the photos from “2_Organize” to “Down_South”. Go back to “2_Organize” and select all the pictures (see last month's article on how to do this), then click on one of the photos and keep the button held down. Lastly, drag the photos over to “Down_South” (a blue rectangle appears over this Folder) and drop (let go of the button) the photos. As if by magic, all the selected photos are now moved and your “2_Organize” Folder is again empty, ready to be filled when next you want to transfer photos to your computer.
At this point we have covered the basis of the 5 steps of photo manipulation (1.Taking the photos, 2. transferring them to the computer, 3. rotating and selecting the ones to keep, 4. renaming and 5. organizing them). It is now time to have FUN with them and this we will be looking at next time ...
Take good care of yourselves,
questions.monamilordi@gmail.com
This article originally appeared in Main Street – The Laurentians' English Language Community Newspaper.
