Introduction

Everyone that starts with digital photography will find that the digital photo collection will accumulate quickly, and that sooner or later some help is needed to organise it. ABC-View Manager (ABCVM) is a new tool for the Windows™ platform that is designed from the start to assist with this.

ABCVM will grow with your needs, it can work with a few hundred photos just as easily as with hundreds of thousands.

Read more in this article to get introduced to the basics and some helper functions, like emailing downscaled pictures, batch renaming images, adding descriptions, searching for keywords and finding duplicate and similar images.

Step 1: Download ABC-View Manager

First of all, download your own copy of ABCVM directly from ABC-View's website. ABCVM is shareware ($29), but you can try it for free, with full functionality, for 20 days (counting only the days that you use ABCVM).

After download, install the software in the usual way, and then click on the desktop icon that is created.

Step 2: Browse your drives and folders

ABCVM will open with a list of your drives on the left and an empty viewing area on the right. You can adapt the layout of the screen and the backgrounds to your own taste, but for now we will stay with the orinal configuration.

It all works a bit like Windows Explorer. You can open drives and folders under My Computer by double clicking on them, or clicking on the little [+] in front of them.

Step 3: How to add multiple folders

Here's an important difference: Explorer works just with the contents of one folder, while ABCVM is able to show combined results of multiple folders. This is why there's a white square (checkmark) in front of each folder. Click it to add the contents of the folder to the main collection.

You can add multiple folders this way. Let's assume you have these folders with photos. The first (Holiday) and the second (People).

• [+] [ ] C:\Pictures\Holiday\
• [+] [ ] C:\Pictures\People\

You can add both folders by checking the white square:

• [+] [v] C:\Pictures\Holiday\
• [+] [v] C:\Pictures\People\

Above, you will notice that All Items shows a number, e.g.

• All Items (395 items)

Now click on All Items and you will have the combined result of Holiday and People. All these files are visible in the right viewing area.

Congrats, you just created your first combined collection! With some practice you can use this to quickly create a subcollection of all your files that you want to search.

Step 4: List your photos

ABCVM will start up showing thumbnails of your images. These are mini-versions of the original images. When hovering over these thumbnails with the mouse you will notice more info on the photo including it's date, size and folder.

If you want even more information, then turn to Details View (F12). In this mode your photos are listed in a table with the columns showing all kinds of details. Return back to Thumbnail View (F8).

You can adapt ABCVM to show other size thumbnails, or other details, through the options (thumbnails and fields tab).

Quickly change the display mode with the tool buttons just above the viewing area. You can hold your mouse over a toolbutton to see what it does.

Step 5: Sort your photos

With many photos in your list you need means to find the right one. Often, it helps to sort photos. This way you can easily find a photo, for example:

• Sort on Date to find photos of a specific event of which you remember the date, e.g. a birthday or a visit to Disneyland.
  
  
• Sort on Name to find photos of people or events, provided that you rename your photos to meaningful names (instead of for instance DSCF0001.JPG)
  
  
• Sort on Similarity to find images that are alike! This will help you to find downscaled and adapted copies of the same photo.
  
  
• Randomize your items. Randomize is not really a sort method. It just shuffles your items so that they are in no particular (random) order. Ideal for a slideshow.

You can sort in a few different ways. There are the toolbar sort options, you can use the menu Tools > Sorting >, or you can rightclick on items and then select Sort List > .

You can also click on the columns to sort by them, another click reverses the list.

Step 6: View your photos

You might have already noticed the small preview image in the lower left corner when clicking on a particular thumbnail. When you double-click on any image, this preview image is enlarged to full-screen mode.

In full-screen mode you can still navigate through your photos. Simply use the Page Up and Page Down buttons to go to previous and next image. With the Pause button you can start and stop the slide show. Go back to the normal mode with the [Enter] key or double-click.

In both modes you can get more info on a photo by rightclicking and selecting Properties. If you are working with digital photos, you can see the EXIF information that was generated by your camera, under Tags.

Step 7: Email photos

Now it's time to start doing something useful instead of just admiring the images! One tedious task, that often returns if you own a digital camera, is to email your friends the pictures that you took.

Warning: modern cameras produce pictures that are quite large files, and usually much too big to send as attachment

ABCVM can downscale and compress the photos you want to email, and attach them to your email message automatically.

First, select the photos you want to email. Just click the first one, then add any additional ones by holding [Ctrl] and clicking them. Continue until you have selected some ten images that you want to email.

Next, you click the toolbar button Email-a-Friend...

In the dialog that appears, you'll see your photos listed. Simply check the checkbox saying Reduce Image Size. The default email size is 500x500 pixels max, but if you want bigger or smaller images attached, you can change this. ABCVM automatically displays the target size of the images. When you click OK Next, your email will be generated. ABCVM will connect to your email client, e.g. Outlook Express or any other MAPI compliant email program

You can finish the email there, perhaps add subject and message text and then click on Send.

Note that ABCVM creates temporary copies to attach to the email, and once sent, these copies are automatically removed. You don't risk loosing your originals!

Step 8: Batch-rename images

Your camera is really creative with its names for the photos. Usually this is something like DSCFxxxx.JPG, where the xxxx stands for the current index number.

Some may like these fancy names, but most people like useful names better. You can use Exlorer to change the name of a file, but then you will be busy for a while, if you have to rename a series of 30 pictures individually from last big "grandma's 80th birthday" event.

You can select the images you want to rename, then click Tools > Rename (F2) to start the dialog shown above. Type a new mask, keeping some ## characters in. Each # is a number.

You can keep the old numbering, but you can also opt to number the series starting from 1, select new numbering.

Have a look at the preview columns that show how your filenames will look after renaming. If there's any naming conflict with existing files, you'll see them listed under the column Conflict. Click on Yes to do the renaming.

Hang in there to become a real pro!

Step 9: Adding descriptions

What about adding some descriptions? Just a line of text added next to each photo will help identifying it quickly later, when you start searching for a specific one.

Select one image or a bunch, then hit Describe Items (F3) to make the description pane show up. Click on OK to store the description.

You can see your descriptions in details mode (F12) or by hovering over the item. Note that you can add one description to multiple items at once.

When you add descriptions with ABCVM, they will be stored in the collection, which you can save. Reload the collection next time you start ABCVM.

So when working with descriptions, don't forget to save! Choose Collection > Save or Save As... from the menu.

Step 10: Finding keywords

Pfew. What did all this work bring you? So if you either named your images, or you added descriptions, and perhaps used a good naming scheme for your photo folders and subfolders, you can use ABCVM's powerful find filter to search for just the photos you want.

Click on All Items, then rightclick and select Find. The search function will now work on all the images in the collection. In the dialog that pops up you can type some search phrases.

Also pay attention to where to search:

Sometimes it is useful to check Path Name. Check Content if you are not searching photos but textual files (Word documents, text files). The search can look inside these files to find matches.

When you click OK, the search will conduct and you can see the results in the special search "subfolder"

Step 11: Duplicates and similarity

For the real pros!

ABCVM can find duplicate files. Sometimes, you copy an image and forget to delete it later, or you download an image which you already have under another name.
ABCVM can even find similar images. This is especially useful if you have downscaled versions of originals, or versions that have text added or logos.

Both functions can be found when rightclicking on All Items, and selecting Add Filter >. If you want to learn more about similarity searches, then read this article.

This concludes a not so brief introduction to ABC-View Manager. Hope you like it!

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