Digital Focus: Add Motion to Your Photos

Dave's Favorites: Catalog Your Photos With Adobe Photoshop Album

Digital cameras let you take pictures with impunity. Since you're no longer buying film or taking your photos in for processing, you're no doubt taking more pictures than ever. The downside? Your hard disk is probably cluttered with untold legions of poorly organized and mysteriously labeled image files. What the heck is DSC997089.jpg? Finding specific photos on a hard disk with 500 images is a real hassle.

There are a variety of photo managers out there, but Adobe's brand-new Photoshop Album is my favorite. Most programs require you to painstakingly enter keywords for every one of your many photos. When you're done with that monumental task, you can search for "cat" to find all the photos that have a cat in them.

With Photoshop Album, though, you create a batch of tags that are kind of like keywords. You then drag and drop those tags, which reside on the side of the screen, onto applicable pictures. You can assign multiple tags to each photo, so a given image might be identified as a Family, Animal, and Vacation picture. Later, when you want to find a specific image, you just click on all of the tags that describe the photo, and you'll eliminate any photos from view that don't meet your search criteria. There's virtually no typing involved, and because the program is very visual, it's perfect for photographers.

Photoshop Album also features a timeline that shows when the currently selected photo was taken. You can use the timeline to further define your search: You can scroll through it to move through a sort of visual history of your photography, or you can select a specific period of time to perform your tag-based search. Want to see vacation pictures from 2001? Drag the timeline pointer back to 2001 and then click the vacation tag. Vacation pictures in Paris? Click your Paris tag as well. It's that easy.

Photoshop Album is an innovative solution to the vexing problem of digital photo management, and its under-$50 price tag makes it accessible to just about everyone. You can find it on Adobe's Web site. For the best price, go the PCWorld.com Product Finder.