There is no simple answer to this question. There are many factors to weigh:

• Is the photographer an amateur or professional?
• How large is the photo collection?
• Are the pictures in JPG format, in RAW format, a mix, or something else?
• What is the primary platform?
  • Windows, Mac, iOS, Android something else.

• How are the photos used?
  • Emailed to friends and relatives.
  • Posted on line to a photo service like Flickr or SmugMug.
  • Posted to social services like Facebook or Google+.
  • Printed,
    • Locally on an inkjet or color laser printer.
    • Through a photo printing service.

• Are the photos edited before printing, posting, or emailing?
  • If so, what software is used for editing?
    • Specialized editing software like Adobe Photoshop (Elements and CS5) or GIMP
    • Organizing software tools, such as those found in Picasa or iPhoto

• Is metadata (Exif) important?
  • Are the images geo-tagged?
  • Do you want to manually add location information if not geo-tagged?

• Is face identification wanted?

Two important activities in managing a digital photo collection are organizing and culling.

Organizing
There are three bits of information we can use to organize our photos

• Date – when were the pictures taken?
• Location – where were the pictures taken?
• What – what or who is in the picture?

Another way to think of these things is as events, places and faces. Sometimes we want to put together things that may have different combinations of these factors. Albums are the way to put together images that have different dates, locations and/or people.

Naming your computer folders is an important first step in organizing your photo collection. I put my images into folders named for the day the photo was taken. I opt for a year-month-day date convention for naming folders. They look like “2011-08-01”. I use four digits for years, and two digits for month and day. This is because I want my folders to sort correctly in Windows Explorer or in OS X Finder on Macs. If you use names like “May-2, 11”, you will find that sorting chronologically is much harder.

Some people like to put place or events in folder names, such as “David’s 50th Birthday Party”. If you want to do that, I suggest you append that information after the date convention noted above. The result would be “2011-08-01 David’s 50th Birthday Party”. This way the folder will sort correctly when displayed in your computer’s file application.

I prefer using albums, created in programs like Picasa, to organize photos from multiple days.

Whatever you do, try to be rigidly consistent when naming and storing your photos. If you do it one way one day and a different way some other time you will have a mess when you try to find something.

iPhoto note: iPhoto, part of the Mac iLife suite, comes installed with all Macs. Therefore, many Mac owners use it. iPhoto is configured to transfer photos from your camera or memory cards directly into the iPhoto library file. Finding your photos through Finder is almost impossible with this setting. If you don’t want iPhoto to suck up all your photos into this giant library file you can change Preferences. Go to the Advanced tab and uncheck the Importing “Copy items into the iPhoto Library” checkbox.

Culling and Rating
Culling improves your photography collection. We all take many more photos today than we did back in the days of film. Many of these photos are bad. They should be deleted, not saved. Pictures of your shoes or blurred subjects do not get better with age. They make your collection less manageable. Professional photographers cull immediately after a photo shoot. You should, too. You can do this directly on your camera or later on your computer, but you should do it.

Another activity that makes your collection more manageable is to rate your photographs. This should be done as closely as possible to the shoot. Rating makes it easier to put together albums or just to browse your collection’s better photos. Most photo organizing applications have a rating feature based upon stars.

A photo editing tip
Most of us shoot without a tripod or a unipod. We may not have steady hands. Straightening your photo before posting, printing or emailing is a simple thing to do and often makes your photos more enjoyable. Most photo organizing and editing programs have built-in, easy-to-use straightening tools. I advise you to avail yourself of these tools. Your audience will appreciate it.

1. Scan the stationery to create a raster image.
2. Erase the text that bled into the logo and clean up stray pixels.
3. Convert the raster image into a vector image that could be manipulated so that the jagged edges created by the scan could be smoothed into lines. Raster images are a set of pixels. Vector images are small programs, mathematical equations, which describe an image’s shapes. Vector images scale well. Raster images do not.
4. Export the vector image back to a raster image.
5. Clean up imperfections in the raster image and fill in the letters’ outlines.
6. Create four sizes of the black raster image.
7. Color the logo, trying to match the screen color to the stationery’s, and create four sizes of the colored logo.

I was unfamiliar with converting raster to vector images. I asked several friends for advice. I have a copy of Adobe Illustrator CS2, which I thought might work (since confirmed) but I am tyro using AI and easily confused by it. I found Inkscape, a free program and more modern than my copy of Adobe Illustrator, did the job.

That was painful. I am glad I don’t deal with graphics often. What a black hole of time! Of course, most of what I do is a black hold of time as well.

Here is the finished product in black and color –

1. Click on the Settings link in the Gmail menu, along the upper right of the web page.
2. Next click on the Labs link.
3. Scroll down close to the bottom of the web page to locate the Inserting Images feature.
4. Click on the Enable radio button.
5. Click on the Save Changes button.

You can now embed images in your emails.

A new control for images has been added to your Compose Mail toolbar.

You can click on the control to add images from your computer or from a web address (URL).