I have a lot of pictures (900+) and gifs (550) I will want to be able to use for PowerPoint Presentations. At the moment they’re in 2 folders; ‘amazing pictures’ and ‘amazing gifs’ respectively.
I’ve used Caliber for managing my ebooks, adding tags, descriptions, ratings etc.
Is there something like that, or something completely different, I could use for easy access to my photo and gif files? If I’m making a Presentation I don’t want to have to look at almost 1500 photos/gifs to find just the right one. It’s taken me over a week to find them all and download them, it would be a shame for them to go to waste.
This is especially relevant to the Gifs because I can only view them one at a time, using IrfanView.
Most photo managers (iPhoto, Bridge, GraphicConverter, whatever came with your camera) allow you to add keywords to the photo description. You can also just add them to the filenames unless you’re using an operating system that limits filename length.
Those of us old enough to remember eight character file names will probably remember the vast joy of moving up to an era of long file names. These are wonderful, because they let you catalogue files. Personally, I encode the date in the filename also, but the main joy is long descriptions of the pictures. “19930814 Mount Laguna Water of the Woods Dam Trailhead.jpg”
I bucket things by year, then by broad categories: Outdoors and Trails; Sci Fi Conventions; Zoo pics; Toys; and so on. I’ve never felt the need to create a database, but if I ever do, I’ll import straight from the file names.
ETA; Windows 7 has this big thing for “libraries.” I swear, I do not have a clue how to use the damn things. I’m a child of the DOS age, and use directories and folders.
Thanks for the help. To clarify I’ve downloaded all of the images and gifs from websites where they had ‘picture of the week/day/month’ and also sites like Buzzfeed which has lots of gifs. I’ll use them in PPTs and Prezis in class specifically for visual learners (I’m a teacher). I’m also making lessons applicable for aural and kinesthetic learners which is a whole other topic.
I’m researching making Youtube videos using these as well. So far, online, I teach on Livemocha (for free) in my spare time but that takes up a lot of my time. If I could post videos that are suitable for speakers of other languages and better than what is there (not difficult) it would save me a lot of time to do other things. I won’t know what the ‘other things’ are until I’ve uploaded enough videos but they will likely be to do with TEFL.
So far I’ve made around 200 PPT presentations, using hundreds of gifs and pictures. I’ve also embedded Youtube/other clips into many of my PPTs. I’ve embraced ‘blended learning’ and using technology in the classroom; so far this year I’ve taught teenagers in Korea and China and teens (in England) from China, Georgia, Russia, Spain, Italy and France and they all seem to appreciate my use of these (and other) techniques.
I digress. I have many image and gif files I want to put into a library of some sorts, so I can pick them out quickly as I produce a new PPT, video or something else online (TBC) for English learners. This is an ongoing project which will take many months to complete; any help will be much appreciated, if you use such software and you can give tips. Thanks.
I do what Trinopus suggests; broad buckets for major categories. Vacations, day trips, people and pets, etc. Subfolders in those break it down further.
All my photos have a date suffix so I can see when it was taken: Aug 2013 for example.
The easiest would be to categorize them by source, then by subject matter. You’d be able to find things relatively easily and also provide a photo credit for the final product.