What's the best free software to organize and download photos from a camera?

Answer 1

I also just use the folder structure in Windows. I have a folder for the year, then a folder for each month:

My Documents\My Pictures\2007\10

If there is a big event, then I also create a folder inside the month:

My Documents\My Pictures\2007\10\Paul and Sarahs Wedding

This makes it easy to manage pictures, as no folder gets too big to browse through.

I would not recommend you reduce the size of the photos. Once reduced, the image quality is lost forever. They will look OK on the screen, but if you want to print out one day, they will never look as good, because print needs higher resolution than a monitor. If you start to run out of space on your computer, buy a bigger hard drive, they are cheap nowadays.

Answer 2

I have found that creating folders and subfolders in Windows is more than sufficient, and avoids the necessity of downloading another piece of software that would just gobble up my computer's resources!

Start with a folder in "My Documents" (or anywhere, for that matter), called "Epic's Photos"
Then, add basic subject folders, such as "Me", "Family", "Friends", "Pets", "Travel", etc.
You can even add sub-folders with stuff like "2007" or "Winter 2007" or "School Pals" or "Dog", etc.

Then, just copy each photo from your camera to the relevant folder. Nice and easy; nothing to remember and nothing to recover or lose if the software goes kerflooey (it's a technical term; look it up!). ;)

Additional suggestions: Back-up your photos at least twice a year! A friend lost precious, irreplaceable photos, because her computer mfr told her to re-format her disk for a minor problem, and she didn't know better. And, BTW, don't bother to compress or "zip" the images, because the compression rate of only 1%-5% isn't worth it, but do consider "shrinking" the images using your favorite photo-editing software (it's usually called "re-sizing"; just make sure that "scale image" or similar is selected, so that you don't wind-up with bizarre looking photos! And, of course, don't shrink it to the point that everything is unrecognizable).

Say, did I go too far with this answer? ;)

Answer 3

I would try picasa, which is a free download from google.