Posted by mikeg on December 9, 2009
I am continuously being impressed with Windows Live Photo Gallery. Here is yet another useful feature:
Sometimes I use two cameras at the same event (point-and-shoot and DSLR) and whenever there is a party or vacation with friends, I end up pulling together pictures from all the cameras and combining into a single album. The problem is that the cameras’ date/time are usually not synchronized, especially when traveling to another time zone. There are a few utilities (not easily found) that allow you to update date/time, but Live Photo Gallery is easier/more logical to use.
Pick one or more images and adjust one or more controls – in the screenshot above one of the cameras was incorrectly set to AM, while the event was in the evening. I adjusted AM to PM and it preserved everything else
Rarely used, but very helpful function.
Posted in Digital Pictures | Tagged: Windows Live Photo Gallery | 2 Comments »
Posted by mikeg on January 10, 2008
Having a small child I take a lot of pictures and I do not download them to my computer very frequently. That makes sorting and filing pictures a chore that takes quite a bit of time. I also try to be organized by filing pictures into appropriate folders and giving them meaningful names (I will have a separate post on my current “digital pictures workflow” and tools I use).
Not satisfied with limitations of Windows XP built-in rename functionality, I started searching for a utility that will help me with that task. After trying 4-5 different programs (commercial and free), I purchased the following tool: Better File Rename (v5).
BFR (Better File Rename) has a few nice options:
- Context menu integration which you can invoke on set of files or a folder
- Extensive list of built-in actions
- You can also drag and drop files into it once it is open
- “Droplet” support — see below for screenshot explaining what it does
A few notes:
- The easiest UI/richest set of built-in actions of all the tools I’ve tested
- Took me a minute to find “produce numbered list” — that’s probably the most frequent action I will use when filing my pictures
- Only $20/user — on any number of computers. This is important for me because I have a laptop, desktop and sometimes do this on my wife’s laptop
- Take a look at this page if you are interested in other tools. It also provides links that explain how to perform renames in tools you already use (Photoshop, IrfanView, etc): http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/renamers/Batch_Rename_Picture_Files_Tools_Tips.htm
Here is what UI looks like:
- I really liked the fact that I can “layer” my actions by performing multiple actions in a row
- There is a very impressive set of “actions” (everything from “produce numbered list” to “insert”, “replace”, “regular expressions” and many more)
- For every action you have a number of options that are configurable
- Preview of what the new name will look like
Here is what I would like to see in the next version:
- Preview support for images
- Improvements to “manual rename” — specify prefix, suffix and then allow me to manually rename each file. This only makes sense if preview support for images is implemented
- There is “droplet” functionality, but I would like to be able to load droplet into BFR as preset
- Ability to update EXIF/IPTC info for images
Here is the full list of actions:
Droplet description:
Let me know what tools you use for your file renaming/image processing needs.
Posted in Digital Pictures, Utilities | 2 Comments »
