Yes, back by popular demand (ok a couple of requests…lol) here are five more favorite ways to customize ACDSee Photo Manager.

5. Let’s start off with fonts again.  Or at least my favorite way to find my system’s installed fonts.  It used to be a dig through my C drive and Windows folder but I created a shortcut in the favorites pane.  Now it’s right at my fingertips.  You can also add a shortcut to your ‘new downloads’ file to make it easy to keep up with unzipping and tagging new downloads.  Have a go-to file of favorite elements or a favorite designer you search for a lot?  Add a whole folder to your favorites or individual files from all over your collection and create a folder to put them in.  Here’s a tutorial showing you how to do it!

4. Get rid of those Auto-Categories you never use.  That’s right, you don’t have to scroll endlessly through that long list of auto categories.  Just right-click on one of them and then click on the ‘Remove from Commonly Used’ option that pops up.  I decided to only keep Author and Keywords in the Commonly Used list since I actually use those and I keep the Photo Properties set collapsed.  And don’t worry, the information is still there in the properties pane and can be restored to the Auto Categories lists by right clicking on them in the properties pane.

3. Customize your workspace.  I like to keep the Preview Pane closed…with PM10, the pop-up preview is all I need.  If I want a closer look than that I double click to see it in the viewer.  I like to have my file tree go from the top to the bottom of the screen and I close the Image Basket to tag and browse and only use it when I’m pulling stuff together to create a page.  With ACDSee, there are lots of panes to choose from so seeing your images clearly and the tools you use the most often is easy to do.  And anything you want to see that you closed is available in the View menu…you can even Reset Layout to return to the default workspace layout.  Each pane has a stick pin icon in the corner that lets you auto-hide that pane when you’re not using it and the little drop-down arrow next to that allows you to float panes so you change where they are docked.  (I keep my calendar pane on the left under the files, favorites, and search panes.)

2. Set up your default editor.  I have used a variety of scrapbooking programs and am currently using ACDSee Photo Editor Beta 2 for most of my scrapping.  But it’s not the only editor on my computer.  Go to Tools|Open in Editor|Configure Editors… and then you can add editing programs, set the default editor, and check the box if it supports opening multiple files at once.

1. The most important customization this week: Set your database to remind you to back up weekly!  You can set it for other time spans such as monthly or yearly but why would you want to do that?  Take it from a veteran of computer crashes, you can’t back up too often!  Just go to Tools|Options and find the Database options in the list.  Check the reminder box, and pick a time interval…that’s all there is to it!

I hope you have fun this week playing with getting your workspace set up nice and comfy and get your back-up habit going.  Don’t forget to check our calendar to the left…and sign up for our newsletter if you haven’t done so already.  We have some big chats coming up that I know you won’t want to miss!

Happy Tagging!

I’ve been playing with setting up my categories, my preferred desktop layout, and other goodies in ACDSee Photo Manager and thought I’d share my top five ways to customize ACDSee.  So let’s get started!

5. Changing the font display text:

4. The minty-fresh background of my PNG thumbnails:

3. Speaking of thumbnails, I love my custom thumbnail information display:

Just click on Tools | Options and find the Thumbnail Info option under File List.  Click on Choose Thumbnail Info… then customize it to your liking.  I like mine with designer and kit names…of course, you have to fill in that information when you’re organizing.

2. Generated file listing details.

It’s the same options settings dialog we just looked at…just use Details View instead.   Generate a listing of your Image Basket to make giving credits easy.

1. My number one favorite thing to customize is setting up Photo Manager to start where I want it to start:

Yes, same box…Tools | Options again…click on Browser then pick a starting folder or have PM start wherever you left off last time you were using it.

Once you get your workspace all set the way you like it the tagging, searching, and crediting all goes pretty fast!  So what about you…what’s in your ‘Fave Five’?  Post a comment here and tell us what customizations you like best.

I’ve had a lot of requests to explain my speed tagging system and include screenshots so here it is. Of course, all the credit goes to Heidi and Connie for providing this site where I learned all these tips and tricks…this is just how I’ve combined them to make organizing my digi supplies a fast and fun process.

Step 1. Select a range of folders in your file list. Try not to bite off more than you can do in one sitting. In order to include sub-folders you need to expand your file tree…highlight the parent folder above the ones you want to work on and use the asterisk * key to open all of the sub-folders at once…hit it again if you still have plus + signs showing. If you have alphas mixed in with other files, separate them into their own folders first.

Step 2. In the center pane just above your thumbnails click the drop-down boxes to Group by ‘File Type’ and then Sort by ‘File Size’. This places JPEG’s together, previews on top, paper below. The next group is PNG’s and small files like staples are on top while the largest ones, usually quick-pages and overlays, are near the bottom of the group. Layered PSD files are in a separate group as are ABR files. Be careful when you’re ready to work through your PNG’s, to select kit folders but skip the alpha folders.

Step 3. You can tag by selecting multiple thumbnails such as all the quick-pages and dragging the thumbnails to the category in the Organize pane, the category to one of the selected thumbs, or by checking the box next to the category in the Properties pane (make sure it’s on the Database tab)

Step 4. Highlight only one designer’s folders, click inside the center pane and use Ctrl I to select all images, then assign the designer’s name to the Author field. Select only the folders belonging to a particular kit and use Ctrl I again then add the kit name under Caption. You can see that I changed my ACDSee thumbnail display options to show author and caption instead of filename. I can also choose for the Generate File Listing function to include these fields and easily handle credits.

I had several starts using several types of organizing systems and this is what ended up fitting my style. There are many ways to use ACDSee Photo Manager and it’s flexibility is part of what makes it such a powerful tool for digital scrapbookers, professional photographers, or anyone with a lot of media files to organize.

The yummy kits featured in this tutorial are from the 4 Seasons CD which is only available with the purchase of ACDSee Photo Manager and/or Photo Editor
And be sure to grab the 20% off discount code on our Birthday Celebration page here at DSI! Happy Tagging everyone!

How many times have you went looking for something on your computer & didn’t really know where to begin?

• an email that you know you received or sent? with the person’s name or topic?  but you have 5+ accounts)
• a document & you can’t remember if it’s an email attachment or on your hard drive?

I just don’t have the patience or time to spend looking for those types of things anymore.

So, copernic has become one of my ESSENTIAL desktop app’s. And it’s free as most are that I bring you!

What it is:

It’s a desktop application that you download, install, and then it catalogs your hard drive. My sister was suspect of this, but she’s heard me rave about it enough that I think she may be using it. (She reads more email accounts into Thunderbird than I do).

How to use it:

Copernic installs a little search bar in the bottom right of your window

Type in your search term. In this case I’m going to look for email from Robin (from Rakscraps).

A pop up window comes up when you start typing.

The search results for Robin show 65 emails, 32 files & 3 contacts.

From here click on the “Open Main Window” & a full window opens with a bottom pane showing the details of the email or file that you choose.

The choice to Reply or Forward email from Copernic doesn’t work.

But you can open files from it, which is very handy!  This handy little app saves me a LOT of time!

In the near future ACDSee 10 will have an update that will include a major enhancement that will appeal to Digital Scrappers! You’ll have the ability to view your abr brushes!  I can’t share the details on how it works but I can tell you this.  Soon you will be able to view and organize your abr brushes just like you organize your other image files in ACDSee Photo Manager 10. 

By the time the update is released, Heidi will have a video guide showing you just how it works!  

ACDSee recognizes the importance of customer feedback and is striving to improve their product to meet digital scrapbookers needs & requests.

Did you know that you can upload your photos directly inside of ACDSee 10 to two photo services, Smugmug & Flickr?   We presently have a poll going on what other services people would like to see included in ACDSee Photo Manager 10. What online photo services do you use the most frequently? Please let us know there.

If you have ideas for other enhancements for ACDSee products, please add them to this thread.

And we’ll keep you updated on when the update for viewing ABR brushes is available for ACDSee Photo Manager 10.

ACDSee Photo Manager 10 was recently released with a number of new features.

Do you just keep saving files & pretty soon things are out of hand?  On the weekend I took some time to sort thru a bunch of folders & organized the files by topic.  (Now I probably won’t be able to find anything!)  Hopefully it will save time.

Then I decided to catch up on my blog reading & came across this post:

Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive How to Do Email and RSS Just Once a Day ? and Boost Productivity in the Process «

Yeah, uh huh … how to do email once a day & boost productivity!  So that sucked me in & I thought I would share it with you.  RSS (blog reading) doesn’t affect my time management because I catch up on blogs about once a week.  After reading that though, I pared down my blogs in my reader down to a manageable amount based on:

• how often I read the blog
• the content of the blog - do most posts hold my attention?

 Then I attacked my email:

• I started scrolling & instead of deleting, I would unsubscribe if it was a newsletter.  Then I searched & deleted all old ones from that source.
• As I moved down thru my email, I was able to wipe out a lot of ‘junk’ that way.  And hopefully turned much of it off.  I kept the ones that I read.
• I have folders set up in Thunderbird which I love & would die without.  (If you want to use Thunderbird to read your Google mail in it, I have some news coming for you on that)

Now, I’m a fairly organized person & LOVE how Evernote keeps my lists & life in order, so I consider myself fairly ok in that respect.  But I’m not sure I could survive by reading email only once a day!  ack!!  But they do have some good ideas there. 

Web Worker Daily is a nifty blog & I thought many of you may like it since that describes you!  Did you notice that they don’t mention IM, can we say Hello!?  *grin*  I love being interrupted by my friends on Hello & even ACDSee questions. 

So does anyone do email only once a day?  Would you find that challenging? or could you go cold turkey… I mean adjust?  I’m curious to hear your thoughts!  How do you keep your desktop & email organized?  Is it a struggle or do you have a great system?

I love plays on words & that suited me.  Today I’m going to link you to ideas for organizing Actions and I’m going to tell you about my own organizing efforts.  Hopefully it will help me to be more efficient so I have more time to blog!   

What are Actions?   Actions are used in Adobe Photoshop & Photoshop Elements.  They are a set of steps that are ‘recorded’ or saved & can be used over again & again.  The advantage is that it’s a one click effect that initiates any number of steps to achieve the same goal each time.  For Paint Shop Pro, the equivalent is Scripts.  ACDSee Photo Editor has built in photo adjustments that allow you options for adjusting your photos by selecting from options

Because I don’t use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, I’m going to link you to my friend Hummie’s blog.  She outlines her ideas for organizing her Actions.  She also links to her tutorial for converting Photoshop Actions so that they can be used in Photoshop Elements.  So if you’re like Hummie & need to get your Actions in order, then try her suggestions:

Hummie’s World: Organizing Actions in PSE 

This week when I was looking for something else, another suggestion for organizing Actions were different, so I’ll link you to Katherine’s way too. 

And since I don’t have Adobe Actions, I was working on my own organizing.  I’ve had my laptop for 8 months & last night spent time organizing all my doc’s & files.  What a good feeling!  So today I rewarded myself by installing 8 plugins for Window Live Writer.  I will play with them & let you know which are worthwhile.  And I have a list of ideas to blog about.  My next thing is to try to get my blog reader feeds pared down to what I actually read!  It must be a laptop housecleaning weekend! (It’s certainly not happening in my house! )

Since I’m rambling I’ll wrap it up with sharing the crazy thing I did on Thursday night - I bought two domain names.  Now I used to splurge on paper slabs… did I need them, no?  but I bought them anyway.  So now I’ve moved on to buying domain names … I think I’m a geek now officially!  (maybe you had noticed this already?!).  So if any of you wanted  conniebensen.com sorry! it’s taken… and I bought another, but I’ll blog on that one later.  What to do with them?  Well, I’ll have to rely on my sister for that. 

The great thing about the web is that you meet wonderful people & they are willing to share their knowledge!  I love learning from others.  Katie & I bumped into each other long ago because we’re both librarians.  When I saw her excitement about having found this software, I asked if she would write a blog post for our Mac friends.  So, thank you Katie for sharing!

This was written by Katie, aka stampnbug

I am a Mac user through and through, but have been so envious of PC users because of their ability to use ACDSee to organize their digital scrapping supplies. I tried organizing in iPhoto, using Adobe Bridge, keywording and then using Spotlight (a Mac feature)?none of these options really fitted my needs.

Recently, My Digital Muse wrote about Shoebox in their latest newsletter. I decided to give it a try. Shoebox is a browser, which allows you to tag (categorize/assign keywords) your supplies. I found it very intuitive and easy to use. I am a still in the process of tagging my supplies, so by no means am I an expert at using this program, but I wanted to share what I have learned so if there are other Mac digital scrappers who might want to try this software.

There are two important things to consider before you begin tagging:

• you need to think for a moment how you would like to organize your supplies so that you can set up your categories. I found the organizing styles page at DigiScrapInfo to be very helpful
• you do not want to move files around once you begin tagging (or paths will be broken) so make sure you files are arranged in a way that you like

You are now ready to begin tagging?quite the undertaking I am finding!

A few tips in regards to tagging:

• you can assign as many tags to each file that you want ? the tags are what will help you search for things, so I feel the more detailed the better.
• you can assign tags to more than one item at a time ? click on an item, push the shift key, and then click on another item in the row ? it will select all the items between the two you selected. OR you can click and then hold down the command key (open apple) and select items one at a time. These two options are helpful to assign tags to multiple items (i.e. ?paper? or ?brads? in a kit)

An example of tagging is listed above. This particular piece of paper is solid yellow. Above the tags is the actual file name.

Another very helpful tip:

• you can customize your toolbar. The first thing I did was add Photoshop to my toolbar so that I can very easily click on an item, then click the Photoshop button?and it will immediately open it in Photoshop.
• There are two steps to be able to add Photoshop (or any other photo editing program) to your toolbar:

1. You need to set Photoshop as your default photo editing application. To do this, go to Shoebox preferences, click the photos tab, and then where it says edit photos in choose Photoshop. Close the preference window.
2. Click the View menu, choose customize toolbar, then all you need to do is drag the Photoshop icon up to your toolbar (see my screenshot below)

There are two versions available. Shoebox Express is $29.99, which allows you to create up to two catalogs, add 10,000 photos to each catalog, and view 1,000 photos at a time. Shoebox Pro is $79.99 and allows an unlimited number of catalogs and an unlimited number of photos. Visit the Shoebox website at: http://www.kavasoft.com/Shoebox/ to learn more about the software or to download a trial version.

Kathy has a Mac blog  Digi Scrap Mac and she has info on organizing PS Actions

We also blogged about another software for Mac’s:  Graphic Converter

Where do you write your blog posts? One day Wordpress “ate” one of mine & since then I started composing in Word because it seemed more friendly. I add links & format it there, then just do one big copy & paste in to Wordpress.

Auntie Pea was raving about Windows Live Writer, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. And I must say that I’m quite impressed! After playing with it today, there is so much to share!

Here are the features:

• Very easy to install & set up with your blog (uses blog URL, username & password)
• Write posts offline
• Drafts can sit on your computer
• Software learns the blog’s format, so the preview appears just as it would online
• Synchronizes with your blog & allows you to have up to the last 500 posts on your computer
• Overall allows easy management of drafts & publishing
• The coolest thing is that you can manage multiple blogs!

Extra touches of interest:

• More text options like text sizes, various fonts, font colors, etc!
• Plug-ins are available & more will be coming that are specific to blogging platforms
  • yep, I added the smileys (both msn & Yahoo)
  • as I add more I will blog about any that are particularly useful (like the must have smileys!). There are presently 3 pages & I’m sure that will grow.

This is going to be one very useful & powerful tool! I’ll blog about it again after I’ve used it for awhile. If you try it, let me know what you think & what features you find helpful?

Evernote 2.0 has become my choice for organizers. I tried Google notebook but I wasn’t consistent with it (and you know how that goes – or doesn’t go I should say!).

I blogged about Evernote some time ago. And it was good then, but when I updated to version 2.0 – wow! And maybe what I love most about it is that the tagging is very similar to that of ACDSee Photo Manager. (ie – I understand it & use it!)

The features that make it great are:

• It’s a powerful FREE program!
• Copy & paste notes in
• Deleted notes can be retrieved
• Very intuitive – right click on most anything for options
• Can easily change dates of notes
  • Making them more prominent
  • Or into the future
• Click & drag URL’s in from the address bar & they remain clickable!
• Click & drag images in & a clickable link to their origin is created
  • This is very handy for digishopping ideas

For cataloging your notes

• Premade categories like To-Do are offered
• Can make your own categories
• Assign multiple categories to one entry
• Add a cute icon for each category
• Clicking on the category brings up only those notes