With my iMAC, I have now learned to turn all of my trips into DVD slideshows with background music. I also, using a program called iPhoto, just put the digital pics I like into a "album," click a few buttons, and order a thin paper album that arrives at my house for under $30. No more shoeboxes or (hubby gets mad when I even think about how much money I wasted on unused scrapbooking supplies) never-finished albums. We actually DO watch them every now and then, and the spped of a slideshow makes them less painful for our captive friends to watch when they ask politely about our trips!

I would like to say that we just got back from Italy on Tuesday, and my LW has already sorted through, selected and loaded four albums of our shots onto our Webshots page. Three cheers for Ms. Go!

See them here:
http://community.webshots.com/user/go_family

Great photos..thanks for sharing.

I really appreciated them because we got back from the same area a few weeks ago.

another tip from a previous post of mine.

I'm not sure if other digital cams have this option...

but I set my camera so that each days pics automatically go into a separate (dated) folder on the media card

Dick's suggestion will work best if you remember to set your camera to local time as you move around. I do it routinely when I reset my wristwatch.

Many digital cameras record "metadata" that includes the date and time each image was captured. If you don't keep the clock synchronized with local time, your "Sunset on the Seine" picture will be time-stamped for noon. And your "vacation days" album will be screwed up too, because when you're having breakfast in Paris on Thursday, your camera will think it's Monday night.

(Watch for cameras with integral GPS, which are on the horizon. Not only will they record the latitude, longitude, and altitude of the camera when a picture was created, but will also capture the exact millisecond - in UTC - the button was pushed.)

We enjoy our travel photos so much more as computer slide shows than we ever did when we had them in albums. We even have a laptop connected to an external LCD monitor in our living room, so we can continually relive our trips. The laptop doesn't take up much room, and the continually changing views on the flat screen monitor are better than framed pictures on the wall.

That's a very good point about keeping the date and time on the camera correct. I have't always done so, and have some exif data showing the wrong time.

By the way, if you use certain programs for post-process/digital darkroom, such as Adobe Photoshop or Neat Image, they can strip off this EXIF information. Neat Image as a standalone always does it, I believe GIMP may as well. Adobe Photoshop retains it <i>unless</i> you use the &quot;Save for Web&quot; function.

If you use Windows XP, you can see the Exif info for a jpeg file without opening it in an editor. You can't with RAW files (at least without a interpretive program running). On a JPEG, right click the file in Exporer, choose Properties, then the Summary Tab than the Advanced button if you see one. EXIF will give you you various things, depending on camera make and model. Many times you can get F stop, aperture, focal length, ISO, etc which can also help you improve future shots by showing you what settings worked for a situation and which didn't.

As far as storage, I think mine are spread out over so many servers, hard drives and DVDs that I couldn't get rid of them if I tried. They've become like a plague of locusts...

Just published last week!

<b>http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/raw.mspx</b>

Aw cool! I thank you and my Nikon thanks you. Down it comes...