Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Organizing Photos with EasyShare Albums

As the name implies, Kodak EasyShare provides simple, straightforward tools for the casual family photographer. In that respect, it’s like the kind of cameras that made Kodak famous: point-and-shoot Instamatics with easy loading film cartridges.

Once you download and install the free software (see the note below), you can do everything you can in Windows XP—and more—from within one program. There’s nothing else to learn or buy. And when you’re ready for some basic photo editing, you can do that in EasyShare, too (see Part 3 of this book). Best of all, if you’ve already organized your photos and folders in Windows XP, you can keep them stored the same way. Then, using EasyShare’s Albums, Favorites, and Captions features, you can subdivide and sort your collection in creative new ways without disrupting your underlying Windows folders.

Note

To download the Kodak EasyShare installer, visit http://www.kodak.com, and then click the “Downloads and Drivers” link. The process is just like installing any other piece of software on your PC, but that’s a topic for another book (like Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual).

The first time you run EasyShare, the setup program offers to search for photos on your PC so you can work with them in EasyShare. You turn on checkboxes to tell the program which file types to include—JPEG, TIFF, and so on. Select the formats that your digital camera uses. (If EasyShare misses some, you can always add photos ...