Have you had a chance to delve into your photo collection yet? Any pleasant surprises? If you’re still needing a little motivation, here’s another thing to remember: technology is your friend!
You don’t have to be a computer genius to benefit from all the help technology can offer. I’m working on my digital photo collection at the same time I’m working on my physical collection (glutton for punishment, I know, but I love it!), and I’m reminded every day of all the cool things technology can do for me when it comes to dealing with photos.
One of my biggest setbacks with digital photo collections in times past was that I would have to back up my large digital photo libraries all over the place because we didn’t have the luxury of giant hard drives back in Ye Olde Days of digital photography.
So, when it was time to merge all of those photos into one Master Library, that meant – you guessed it – duplicates! 57,902 duplicates, to be exact, and those are just exact duplicates with the exact same file names.
If I were to go through my 118,630 digital photos and compare each one to see if I had more than one of each image, it would literally take me until the end of time. Or, more likely, until my eyes fell out.
Instead, I can let the computer do what it does best: compute!! I can run a deduplication program like PhotoSweeper and have it compare all the images in my photo library and return the ones it thinks are duplicates. I press start, walk away (because with a library this big, it takes a little while), and voila! The computer tells me which photos to trash. All I had to do was click a button.
But deduplicating isn’t the only fun tech you can enjoy when working on your photos. There are countless programs that help you spruce up your pictures to give them new life and help them shine. From simple filters in programs like Instagram to more robust programs like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom Classic, there are options for people of every tech comfort level. And the programs are improving all the time!
For instance, here is a small photo restoration I did with Photoshop 13 years ago for a photo album I was making for my father-in-law. Nowadays there are programs that can do this kind of work for you. The quality may not be quite what it would be if it was done “by hand,” but if you’re not interested in doing it yourself or having someone do it for you, this is always an option.
And let’s not forget other fantastic things a computer can do with your photos, such as facial recognition and location services! With little effort on your part, you can easily find every photo of Great-grandma Betty or every photo taken with a location-enabled camera on your trips to Sweden. 😉
What are your favorite technology tools?