organisation

Yesterday evening was spent setting up my new printer and organising my digital photos.

The printer is a Canon PIXMA IP4000 and I’m very impressed with it. It’s fast, quiet and the photos I printed direct from my camera looked great. Some that were printed from HP’s new digital Ixus were a little dark but still good. I removed PS Album from my computer and installed Picasa. Then I sorted through my images, deleting duplicates, stuff that was rubbish and then added keywords.

The thing I find with Picasa and Album before it is that it’s very hard to resist organising/naming the actual folders in the same way as the albums within the application. I mean, the point of these packages is to use the albums and keywords/tags to organise things and not have to worry about where the files really are.

a canon for HP

The other day I bought HP a Canon Digital Ixus II on Ebay: it’s a refurbished model and comes with a proper guarantee and everything. To all intents and purposes, it’s new.

HP doesn’t take many photos with her existing camera, an APS Ixus, so I’m hoping that the digital will encourage her some more. I’ve replaced our printer with a nice new Canon model which will mean she can print direct from the camera and the new printer is much quicker than the Lexmark it’s replacing. The printer is also for me, of course. I tend to take a lot of photos but never print them. This is because our old printer was really slow plus the quality wasn’t that great. This was highlighted when I tried the new Kodak kiosk in Boots. It was really expensive but the prints were very good quality and came out quite fast. I knew it was time for a change.

I’ll also install Google’s Picasa image management software on Maude, HP’s PC. Picasa is great. I had Photoshop Album but Picasa is much better and it’s free! I find PS Album usable but quite clunky whereas Picasa was so intuitive to use and it positively encourages you to make full use of it’s limited features. I like focused software like this.

family snapshot

I have finally put up the photographs I took when I went to see Peter Gabrel in Italy last May. Just in case anyone wants to congratulate me on my choice of shutter speeds or something like that, let me just say up front that all I did was turn the dial to Auto and turn the flash off! My camera is a Canon Powershot A70. The photos are over there on the right.