Staying in the picture

You don’t have to do it yourself, of course; photo organisers do it you. As a bonus, they will help you tart up your snaps and then share them using email or the web.

The best software will “tag” your photos with keywords of your choosing: Mum, Minehead, Majorca, and so on – and save them into collections. Later you can find the pictures just by clicking the tag – irrespective of where on the computer you’ve saved them or what you named them. Some organisers also let you apply “geotags” to pictures by dragging them on to a map of the world – so you can instantly find every picture you’ve ever taken in Whitby, even if they were years apart.

Which organiser you choose is largely a matter of how far along the simple-to-geeky scale you want.

Google’s Picasa is among the most popular, not least because it’s free. It is sometimes idiosyncratic but it’s fast and efficient and does its best to make your pictures look attractive on screen – which is the point of taking them, of course. You can do simple edits and the program is particularly good at creating attractive collages. The latest version automatically tries to recognise people’s faces and group them together.

My favourite is Adobe’s Photoshop Elements, which excels at cataloguing thousands of photos at a time, sorting them by keywords and arranging them, in albums with the minimum of intervention by you. As the name suggests, it’s a cut-down (but better looking) version of Adobe’s professional Photoshop software and offers a lot of the same functionality – including a tool to clean up pictures by removing passers-by from the background. But it also has fun modules to create calendars, photo books and animated online albums. At just over £50, it’s about one-fifth the price of the professional version.

The beauty of these programs is in putting your pictures at your fingertips, no matter how many you have.