Working Better, not harder

I've been obsessed with organizing my hard drive for the past few weeks, especially my picture files, which had really gotten out of control. I'm pleased to report that I have regained over 10 gigs of storage space that I had filled with duplicates and other junk. I found a couple of cool utilities that have been very helpful to me as I go through this process.

I used Better File Attributes to change the creation date of files of photos that had been scanned. For example, if I scan my wedding photos today, the file creation date is going to be January 6, 2007, rather than June 16, 1990, and there's nothing I can do in Windows Explorer to change that. Better Files Attributes, however, allows me to set the creation date (as well as any modification date or "last accessed" date) to any date that I want. Well worth the $9.95 price!

I have had a lot of situations where I wanted to add the word "edit" to a file name so that I could merge my edited files and my original files in the same folder. I started off using the "process multiple files" feature in Photoshop Elements 6 to change these names en masse. For some reason that I could never figure out, however, Elements was leaving me with files that were significantly smaller in size than the ones I had started with. I couldn't discern any difference in physical size of the image or loss of resolution, but I just wasn't willing to take a chance that I was somehow losing quality.

I started tweaking the file names myself, one by one, but it was tedious in the extreme. Better File Rename was just the tool for handling an entire folder full of files all at once. I was happy to pay $19.95 to save myself literally hours of typing "edit" over and over and over again.