04 February 2009

Great digital camera tool

Back in 1999 I bought myself a Chicony DSC-800 digital camera for R1,500.00 which could do 1024x768 photographs (800k) and stored these onto a 2MB Smart Media card (yes, 2MB). Since I was practically the first guy in the city to own a digital camera, I took a lot of photographs - over time, it became almost impossible to keep track of them all, especially when I upgraded my memory to a whopping 8MB. True, back then the camera couldn't store EXIF metadata, but the problem of cataloging multiple excursions of photo-sets was as real then as it still is today.

If anyone's like me, they are going to have quite a few digital photographs they want to keep for posterity (or until the next HDD crash, if they don't back up). It becomes a real mission if anyone's like me, and also hoards all 2GB of photographs on your memory card for months, and then multi-dumps them all over the place with no idea which are duplicates, which are from what date or category, etc. To add insult to injury, you'll have multiple events clumped into one subfolder and "conveniently" renamed by the MS picture renaming tool, so your 2006 Christmas photo's are clumped with your 2007 knee-surgery photo's along with your 2009 graduation photo's (not all literal examples here, although if I finish my MMedSc in time, this could all be true, but I digress) as "Christmas 2006".

If only we could use our EXIF-compliant cameras to our advantage! Introducing...


This little beauty professes to rename your photographs into EXIF data, so not only does it help you clump them by date order (which to be honest is the most sensible way to catalog pictures), but you can now compile your friends' photographs of the same holiday together with yours! No more Christmas 2006 albums which last beyond Christmas 2009! Neatly and conveniently store all of your photographs in the right place, at the right time (pun intended).

I give this my "Two enthusiastic thumbs up" award for PortableApp category (it's truly portable), and I give it my "5 Stars" award for the useful software category.

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