Help downloading

Wildcat

Here's my question, I'm the guy that was asked to take pictures for our local high school sports. On a Friday night in football I'll shoot 300-400 shots. Last year I tried adaobe Lightroom and I couldn't handle it. So if I use the Nikon program can pictures be put into files for each game then is it possible to upload them to our site on Facebook? Has anyone used Gimp? As far as editing all I do is crop, if a parent wants to adjust color and such they can do it. Sorry for the long post.

bruto

In my experience the Nikon software is a bit slow, and not terribly convenient for file sorting, though of course it works well on images.

I would suggest that for file handling, if you do not do any big processing jobs, your best bet might be one of the freeware programs, either Irfanview or Faststone Image Viewer. Irfan works very quickly and has a menu in which you can specify a number of separate folders, and copy or move shots into them with a keystroke combination. This will only copy or move original files, and not the results of an editing session, though. If you wish to edit a file, you must save it to your destination using the "save as" function. One small disadvantage with Irfan is that its crop function seems to be free-form only, so if you want to preserve exact aspect ratios it will be difficult. Irfan does, however, do batch operations including resizing and the like.

Faststone has a nicer cropping function, and does a bit more in processing, including some very effective shadow recovery and light alteration even on JPG files. Its resize is good too, and it has a clone and heal function, and a better sharpening function than Irfan. It's a bit slower to operate, though, and not as easy to send files to separate folders. However, if you're doing it game by game, you can simply use the "save as" function, and save the files to a specified folder. If you stay in the program, all "save as" saves will go to the same folder until you specify another, so there should be little difficulty in doing blocks of one game after another. Irvanview's "save as" will save to a pre-determined destination folder when you start it up after shutting down, so you'll have to re-enter any destinations if you interrupt a session, but it also has a "save to destination folder" which will replace a file if you don't change the name. Faststone will save to the destination folder as its startup default. Both give a warning before overwriting.

In either of these programs, if you have no editing to do on a file but just want to make it a JPG and send it somewhere, this can be done very quickly. If you have taken images in a large format and want to shrink it to save space once it's done, then your best bet is to do all the editing first, and then go back and do a batch resizing in Irfanfiew. You have the choice there of either sending your resized pictures to yet another folder, or overwriting the ones you're doing. It may take a little while to find and sort out all the options in Irfan's bulk function - there's a button for "advanced" functions that includes many things, even the addition of a text string, and whatnot. But once you've set your options they will stay set until you change them, and the actual processing is very fast.

Both these programs are freeware, and can both be loaded on the same computer, so you can take your pick as you need different features. Each will save files as a JPG (as well as others, but neither will save in NEF.). I usually use Faststone for processing individual images for the web, but Irfan for batch conversion when I'm doing something like burning a CD of travel shots, because you can easily specify sizes and the like, and it works fast. Faststone also has a batch function but it did not work so well for me.

As a general rule, if you need to process and edit the shots themselves, I think Faststone works best. But if you want fast file type changes and file sorting, Irfan is very good.

If you occasionally have trouble with vertical shots not coming out right on other people's programs, the one program I've found that works every time and makes vertical shots vertical on all other programs, CD and DVD readers, etc. is Faststone. Fastsone has two modes, an editing/viewing page, and a folder view that makes selection of images very easy, and if you rotate a program in either mode it will stay rotated.