Because geek is cool and clever

A good way to manage lots of photos January 9, 2009

So the festivities are now over and all that’s left are the memories – and, if you’re anything like me, approximately half a million photographs, especially if Santa delivered a new camera this year.

I hear a lot of moaning from people (my parents in particular) that the problem with digital photography is that nobody ever gets to see the photographs because they can’t be handed around the room as they were back in the old analogue days.

This complaint, of course, completely fails to recognise that your snaps can be processed just the same as they ever were, either via a photo booth found in many high street shops or by uploading them to a website that offer the service.

The added benefit of digital photography is that we can all now be more like professional photographers who have always taken dozens of shots of a scene, safe in the knowledge that at least one of them should turn out half decent.

And that, I think, is actually part of the problem.

When a camera can store hundreds of photographs rather than the old 24 exposure reels, we tend to fill them up before dumping the lot onto a computer where they might get flicked through once and then effectively abandoned.

All modern computers come with terrific software for organising a photo collection and adding captions to make it searchable but it’s such an overwhelming task that we nearly always leave it until ‘later’.

I’ve found a good solution for those of us without the time required for organisation and it produces something that is actually worth looking at.

Stitching still photographs together into a movie isn’t a new idea. Both Windows Movie Maker and iMovie on a Mac contain picture montage tools but I’ve found the end results too much like something you’d see in a soppy segment on Oprah. All they need is some cheesy piano music in the background.

Then I discovered animoto.com and my faith in stills montages was rekindled.

Animoto is simple to use. Chuck it some photos and your choice of music and it creates a really interesting movie that’s low on cheese and high in quality.

It’s surely better to make a one minute clip of your favourite snaps that you’ll actually want to look at rather than confine the lot to a darkened corner of your computer.