Create Your Own Digital Library

The moment you got your first digital camera, your view of the world has totally changed. You always seem to see something beautiful or artistic in your surroundings, worthy of being captured in pixels. You experiment quite a lot and keep on loading your pictures in your computer. Until one day, you thought of working on a project. You’re sure you have the kind of picture you need – you knew you have it somewhere in your hard disk… in one of those folders… You can’t run a search for it though because you pretty much use generic filenames like Flower1, Flower2, Flower 3 and so on. Uh-oh! Looks like it’s high time for you to organize your digital photos!

Microsoft has something that can help you do that. It’s called the Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9, which actually consists of two imaging applications – MS Digital Image Library 9, which serves as your database of digital images and MS Digital Image Pro 9, which is a photo manipulation program.

A lot of people may like it’s familiar Explorer-like interface – the left pane being the folder pane, while the right side of the window is the image browser, showing thumbnails of your images.

The good thing about Digital Image Library 9 is that you wouldn’t have to transfer your photos from their current location. Instead, it scans your hard disk and locates folders it considers photo folders, afterwhich you may deselect folders that are not appropriate. The images may then be sorted according to date or keywords. From here, you may double-click on a photo to bring it up in a full-screen view and use the basic controls for zoom, fit to screen, rotate and print. You may also select multiple photos for slideshow, the speed of which range from 1 second to 1 minute.

Oftentimes, pictures taken with a digital camera contains metadata. These are information about the photo, such as shutter speed and the date and time the photo was taken. Digital Image Library 9 allows you to add these metadata with captions and keywords to easily categorize and later on identify images. Another nifty feature of this application is that it even allows you to rate your photos! From the preview pane, simply click on how many stars, the highest being five, you wish to assign each photo.

If you wish to do some retouches on an image, simply click the edit button and Digital Image Pro 9 launches and opens the selected image. This application has a lot of quick-fix features such as the Red Eye tool and the Smart Erase, which caters to novice retouchers and home users who don’t want anything complicated.

Being the all-in-one application that it is, Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9 comes with tons of mats, frames and templates for creating professional photo projects such as scrapbooks, photo albums, calendars and postcards. You may also get Microsoft Photo Story, an add-on to the suite that lets you turn your photos into video. Simply choose which photos to include then add some narration if you have a microphone and add music and zooming effects.