Best free photo organizers
Free utility recovers deleted photos
Everyone who owns a digital camera knows that terrible feeling when you have just deleted a photo you really wanted to keep. The good news is that the deleted photo can usually be recovered, provided you don't take any more photos. In fact, the process of recovery is very similar to recovering a file on your PC that you accidentally deleted. Indeed, quite often you can use the same program to undelete your photos that you use to undelete PC files. The free utility Recuva is an example of a program that will do both jobs. Another possibility is to use the specialist freeware photo recovery utility called PhotoRecovery that was suggested to me by subscriber Bill Butlin. The advantage of PhotoRecovery is that it's easier to use for the specific task of un-deleting photos, and has some useful features such as the option of not recovering thumbnails. It's quite a nice program to have on hand for those occasions when you really do need to undelete a special photograph. Freeware, all Windows versions, 3.0MB
[1] http://www.recuva.com/
[2] http://www.mjm.co.uk/freephotorecoverysoftware.html
Convert your photos into ASCII
At this site you can upload a photo and have it converted into an image made up of letters and characters. It's a free service too. Great for T shirts.
http://www.typorganism.com/asciiomatic/
Simple way to scan photo prints
Subscriber Bill Roberts writes, "Gizmo, a friend wanted to scan a number of old 4x6 prints into her PC as digital images. She was trying to use the difficult software that came with her multifunction printer/scanner and asked me for help. Knowing she had MS Office, I suggested she use MS PhotoEditor but was surprised to find that utility was not available in Office 2003 and has been replaced by Photo Management software that is useless to her for that job. With a bit of Googling I was able to find a download site [1] for the old MS PhotoEditor. The result is a small, standalone program perfect for her level of expertise. Now she can easily scan, crop, and 'Save As' where SHE wants to, in the format of choice (jpg)! No installation is required and it's easy to make a shortcut on the desktop to the 'exe' file. I hope this may be helpful to someone else in that position." Nice find Bill. It's a very good example of two different tech principles: first, new versions of software are not always better and second, small, specialized utilities will usually do the job more efficiently than large multi-function suites. (825KB)
[1] http://www.weboffice.uwa.edu.au/help/help/__data/page/53450/microphotoed.exe