Software

Although I have tried some of the professional image management tools (like Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom and Bibble), in the end I decided to use a workflow based completely on Open Source and free tools.

What I like about Google Picasa is the fact that you can manage your photos nearly independently from their distribution on disk. My main fear with the other programs is, that you can import thousands of photos and group and tag them at will - but then your collection lives and dies with this specific software. I wanted more control over the way the image files are stored on disk, so that I can switch easily from one software to another, or use no dedicated software at all.

So I decided to group my images on disk in a two-level folder hierarchy: the first level is location, the second level is date. This way I have an easy to follow scheme that allows me to quickly add images, without categorizing them first by theme or anything else.

Picasa is happy to read the images from this directory tree and allows me to regroup them any way I want. My categorization in Picasa is similar to the folder structure on disk, but it would be easy to choose other criteria. At the moment I use tags to e.g. identify all birding images in my collection.

When I started with the D40, I shot in JPEG format. Until I made this image:

Ignoring the fact that the subject is too far away, the white feathers of the swan in direct sunlight are totally overexposed. Maybe I should have used different settings, but when I pressed the button, the damage was done. Had this been a RAW image, I might have been able to save it in the subsequent process.

Although the image manipulation possibilities in Picasa have greatly improved with every version, I prefer to edit the images with other software. I analyze new images with ViewNX, as this software shows me the unaltered images. I use UFRaw as a first processing step to adjust exposure, contrast and colours. Then I use Gimp to crop the image (and rotate it if necessary). The Wavelet Sharpen plugin helps to increase the sharpness of the image, which is absolutely necessary for RAW images. The edited pictures are exported as JPEGs and imported again into Picasa. From there they are uploaded to my Picasa Web Gallery.