Digital Pictures and PhotoStory3 (4/15/13)

General Thoughts on Digital Pictures and Cameras

Today a wonderful digital camera can be purchased for around $100. Prices will vary depending on how large the viewing screen is and how many mega-pixels of resolution it is capable of. The type of card (analogous to film) also varies from manufacturer to manufacturer (in both capacity and shape) and there may be a lens zoom consideration. It is easy to find a camera today that has a 2GB card and a 3 inch viewing screen. Good brand names are Canon, Sony and Panasonic to name a few. Advertising always brags about the highest resolution – e.g. 12 mega-pixels. Pictures taken at this resolution create very large files. The good news is you can print them as 21” x 17” posters and not lose clarity. The bad news is that they eat up your camera chip and therefore take up more space when downloaded to your hard drive. Most cameras have four or five different resolution settings such as H, M1, M2, M3 and S. The high (H) setting is usually equal to the top number quoted in the ad. A picture taken at this setting could produce a file over 5 or 6 Mega Bytes (huge!). The small (S) setting will create a file way below 1 Mega Byte. This is made for emailing. The ideal setting is usually the middle one. This produces pictures with good clarity while not overwhelming your chip.

Most cameras produce pictures in the J-peg format (.jpg). Many cameras come with some photo handling software (example: Canon Zoom Browser comes with Canon Cameras). The included software is fine, but actually unnecessary. Pictures can be downloaded from the camera using Windows Explorer and manipulated by a number of software packages that are included with Windows or are available for no charge. Windows Photo Viewer, Picasa, Paint, Windows Picture Manager are several photo programs. My favorite comes with Microsoft Office and is called Office Picture Manager (not free).

To move pictures from camera to hard drive, either:  Plug the camera into a USB port using a wire included with camera or  Take the picture chip out of the camera and insert it into a port/slot on the PC (These ports are included with newer PCs) or  Buy a small adapter ($20) that has the slots in it for the camera chip

Once the chip/camera is recognized by Windows it will show up in Explorer as a “lettered” drive (such as G:). On this drive you may see folder something like DCIM which means Digital Camera Images. Within this folder will be the pictures. Highlight the ones you want and drag them to the desired destination folder on your hard drive.

Pictures are named by your camera as they are taken. These names are very little help in understanding what is in the picture. A picture might be named IMG_0035. After you have the pictures on your hard drive, right click on the picture and choose Rename. Then you can name it something meaningful. Several views can be used in Windows Explorer to show pictures where "thumbnails" or "large icons" offer the most useful presentation. Views are found under a dropdown arrow at the top of the Explorer page.

Use Windows Explorer (File Explorer in Win 8) to create folders and group pictures so you can manage them. To create a new folder: highlight the folder you want the new one to be under; Right click it; choose New, choose Folder and type in the name of your new folder and hit enter. (Slightly different in XP). Having a folder named “Cruise2009” or “Family Reunion 2007” or “Grandson First Year” can be used as good organization tools. To populate your new folder, highlight picture names and drag and drop (left click and hold after highlight a picture and move it)

PhotoStory3

PhotoStory3 is a free program from Microsoft that allows you to create a Video using a string of still pictures. It provides for panning or zooming on the pictures, adding labels or titles, narration and/or music. It can be used to produce a .wmv file (Windows Media Video) and then with the aid of free Windows DVD Maker, included with Windows 7 and Windows Vista, can be burned onto a disk that can be played on any DVD player.

The file Pstory.msi, approximately 5MB in size is the program that you can download for free and used to install this software. Since it is a Microsoft Product, the download can be done directly from Microsoft. There may be some discussion about it being for Win XP or its incompatibility with Vista, but I have been able to successfully load it and use it in XP, Vista and Win 7. Google “download pstory.msi” and it should take you to a page to get the file. I have also tested PhotoStory3 with Windows 8 and it seems to work fine. Win 7 and 8 have other DVD creator programs. Dan Phelka 623-535-7791