Page #51 (32. Add an Audio Caption)

Chapter 5. Finding Images, Movies, and Audio Files

IN THIS CHAPTER:

33 About Finding Items in the Catalog

34 Find Items with the Same Marker

35 Find Items of the Same Media Type

36 Find Items with Similar Filenames

37 Find Items with the Same Caption or Note

38 Find Items with the Same Date

39 Find Items Within a Date Range

40 Find Items with the Same History

41 Find Images with Similar Color

42 Hide Items You Don't Generally Use

You'll know your digital photos, audio files, and movies are truly and properly organized when you're able to quickly locate any item in the catalog without struggling to recall its exact filename or the folder you saved it in. If you had to organize photographs, movies, and audio files with Windows alone, you'd probably create an organized system of folders, and then attempt to save each file in an appropriate folder. This limited method of organization quickly leads to all sorts of problems. Suppose that you have a photo of your two kids seated with their granddad and uncle beneath the Christmas tree. Do you file the image in the Christmas folder? Or in the Kids, Granddad, or Uncle folder? Or do you place multiple copies of the image in several folders, wasting disk space?

With the Organizer, you don't have to depend on a series of Windows folders to help you organize your media files. As you learned in 27 Attach a Marker to an Item, you can assign various collection or tag markers to an item, enabling you to locate it in multiple ways. For example, you could assign the Christmas, Granddad, Uncle, and Kids tags to the holiday snapshot, and locate it later on by searching for items with that unique combination of tags. Or you could assign a Photo Album collection marker to your favorite images in that group, and recall them quickly for use in a new photo album creation. Because you're using the Organizer to categorize images and other media files, you can store all of them in the My Pictures folder if you like, rather than creating separate folders for various groups. You can even store media files offline, on CD-ROMs or DVDs. The Organizer doesn't care where files are located; it can organize them all easily.

By the way, tag and collection markers aren't the only things you can use to locate an image or other file, as you'll discover in this chapter. You can also search for media files based on file date, filename, caption, note, change history, color range, and other criteria. With the Organizer and a little bit of work initially marking and captioning items, you can locate any one or any group of photos, audio files, or movies with the people you want, in the scene you want, at the time you want, without any fuss or difficulty.