What do to with your digital photos

If you have a digital camera, chances are you've taken thousands of pictures of your kids, pets and travels. But what do you do with the fast-growing kudzu of all those digital files on your computer? You stick them in your digital shoebox! A digital shoebox is the folder on your PC's hard drive which contains all of the digital photos you've dumped from your digital camera. Like the real shoeboxes we all used to store our photo prints years ago, digital shoeboxes are almost always overstuffed, disorganized, and very difficult to wade through when you're hunting for one particular photo. The paradox of today's best digital cameras is that they make taking hundreds of pictures at a time easy and quick -- and that means our digital shoeboxes are growing bigger and messier at a faster rate than any other part of our PC's hard drive.

Windows PCs running the latest Windows XP operating system have several Microsoft programs pre-installed which are designed to simplify moving photos from a digital camera to the PC, but I find XP's built-in tools too crude and not nearly as elegant or effective as a new program from Google that just happens to be free.  All Windows users should immediately go to Google's www.picasa.com site and download its new Picasa photo organizing and editing program, as it's simply a must-have if you own a digital camera. From automatically downloading images from your camera to organizing your My Pictures folder, to printing all sorts of professional-looking photo formats, Picasa is almost too good to be true. Free software isn't supposed to be miles ahead of most of the programs you pay hundreds of dollars for, but Picasa definitely is.

Mac users are usually luckier when it comes to the built-in software that comes with their Apple computers. The company excels at designing intuitive, creative, no-brainer software that make your experience with the gadgets you connect much more hassle-free than what Windows users typically have to deal with. All new Macs come pre-installed with iPhoto 5, the latest version of Apple's excellent and fantastically intuitive photo organizing and editing software. Whenever you connect your digital camera to a Mac with a USB cable, iPhoto automatically transfers all of the photos from the camera and adds them to the Mac's Pictures folder, and you can view your folders either in a simple timeline if you're trying to locate a specific shot from a certain date, or an actual calendar view that shows thumbnails of the photos on the very day they were taken. Apple iPhoto 5 also has a basic set of image editing tools to correct for red-eye, contrast and color, and a touch-up tool to smooth over those cookie crumbs you thought you'd wiped off your mouth before you said cheese. Free with any new Mac desktop or notebook computer, $79 as part of Apple's iLife '05 software suite. Check out http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/ for details.

While Picasa and iPhoto have basic image editing tools to quickly touch-up a photo before printing or emailing it, serious digital camera users prefer to haul out the big guns when it comes to photo editing, and that means one program and one program only -- Adobe's Photoshop CS, the company's flagship photo editing software. Don't have the $650 it costs to buy the software? Well, you're in luck, because Adobe just released its latest version of Photoshop Elements, now in its 3.0 edition, and for an $89 download ($99 if you want it old-school on CD-ROM), you can enjoy 99.9 percent of Photoshop CS's staggering power for a fraction of the price. Older versions of Elements came within shouting distance of "real" Photoshop -- 3.0 presses uncomfortably close against it. Photoshop Elements 3.0 is for use when you want to go beyond simple red-eye, contrast and color correction. There is literally no end to what you can do in terms of manipulating and altering any digital image with this $89 program. The new spot healing brush tool alone will become a serious addiction for anyone who swipes it across a digital photo that's got a few moles, crumbs, and zits too many.

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