Thanks to its face-recognition tool, iPhoto ’09 can now put names to the faces in your photographs, letting you quickly sift through your library based on content rather than how photos are arranged. But putting this feature to work requires some effort on your part. A few months back I received my copy of iLife [...]

23 tips for getting organized, streamlining your online time, managing your media and more In this Computerworld article, the writer gives several great tips on getting your geeky side in order. I’m happy to note that procurement of a Fujitsu ScanSnap and scanning your life to PDF made number 4 on his list. Other useful [...]

“How a lifestyle experiment and a disaster made me realize the value of turning atoms into bits” — Mike Elgin A couple of months back, Mike Elgin of Computerworld posted an article on his foray into the paperless world: Paperless office? Ha! How about a paperless life? In this followup article, he considers how lifestyle changes and [...]

  How can you keep your data from being held hostage? Have you ever stopped to consider exactly how much information is permanently stored within your favorite applications, locked down to all but the most determined command-line commando? Perhaps the easiest way to explain what I’m getting at is by way of an example…

Work flow is inherent in the kind of work that we do when scanning, indexing, searching, filing, tagging, and backing up all of our documents, photos, music, and video. Once you are committed to digital media, you will find that you often need to cobble together different programs in order to do away with some of the tedious manual labor.

Last week I received my shiny new copy of iLife ’09 in the mail, and I found that the new Faces feature of iPhoto has turned out to be far more interesting than I had imagined based on the reviews. Once the application had finished searching through my library of thousands of family snapshots, I [...]

As soon as you begin storing your paper life on your computer, you are faced with the question of how to name your files. If you carefully select one system and stick with it, your entire document workflow will improve. Here are some thoughts to consider, and a suggestion or two.

The first time I searched for a random scanned document on my computer—and found it—I realized that this is one of the greatest benefits of the paperless home. This is one area where traditional paper lacks. And with the free products available today, there’s no need to be without. In this article, I describe two [...]