Celebrating over nine years of Windows coverage

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	INTRODUCTION Celebrating over nine years of Windows coverage
	By Tracey Capen This is the 400th issue of Windows Secrets. For nearly a decade, the Windows Secrets Newsletter has provided news and tips on the world’s most popular operating system. The success of this newsletter and site is due in large part to the ongoing, loyal support of its subscribers. A big thanks to all those readers who have made financial contributions — large and small — and sent in tips and suggestions for stories. Keep them coming.

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The full text of this column is posted at WindowsSecrets.com/introduction/celebrating-over-nine-years-of-windows-coverage/ (opens in a new window/tab).

Columnists typically cannot reply to comments here, but do incorporate the best tips into future columns.[/td]

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Tracey;
I began reading WS, a few years ago but just the; free edition. However, by the time I read my 3rd. “free issue” I immediately became a “paid subscriber” and have never looked back!
After reading each issue, if there’s something in it I can use, I save that issue. (So far, I’ve saved every single issue of WS that I’ve ever received).
The information, hints, tips, and tricks,and the times I’ve been “rescued” by the newsletter and in the WS forums, has been worth ten times my annual subscription amount.
I’d love to send more but sadly, Tracy, a lot of us don’t pull down the six digit monthly income like you do!
Seriously, keep up the fantastic work you and the rest of WS’s staff already do. I’ve searched for, and tried, many different; “Computer Help and Info” newsletters and for the amount of content, and its quality, WS has no equal.

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Congratulations on your 400th! I have been an avid reader (free, at first, but now a paid subscriber) for many years and I have found your publication to be filled with useful information. Each issue I find that there is a different section that has information of interest to me and I can’t say that about a lot of subscriptions!

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I’d like to suggest an additional tip for Fred Langa’s top story article titled “Proven techniques to secure your Wi-Fi network”: If not needed, disable the ability for a wireless client to communicate with another wireless client connected to the same network. The Cisco Linksys router administration utility on my older router refers to this setting as “AP Isolation”, which is disabled by default. If you enable this setting, then all wireless clients and wireless devices on your network are isolated from each other; they will be able to communicate with the router, but not with each other. Of course, this setting will not work for you if you use a wireless printer.

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Just a question of curiosity: what photo editors/databases do you use?

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I used Photoshop for years, but eventually I switched to Photoshop Elements 11 due to the high cost of the full Photoshop. I’ve tried various image organizers/databases, but I keep returning to my low tech technique of dated folders with descriptive titles. So I use Element’s Editor but currently not the Organizer. I shoot with a Canon 7D and G1X (almost exclusively RAW), so I do my initial scan of new images with Digital Photo Professional, which comes with those cameras.

Still looking for a good organizer that can work with my dated-folders setup. Any suggestions welcome.

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I used a number of different DBs but settled on Organizer 10 years ago. The ability to search against whatever I find of interest expands the usefulness of the tool. Many people in your shoes use Photoshop Light Room because it will search just on free-form key words, file names, and dates. Plus it is a great photo editor. You might want to give it a try.

FYI: a major problem with only sorting in the OS by folder names (dates in your case) alone is that hundreds of files will have the same file names (like IMG_1234). One miss in filing and you stand to lose images because computers really don’t like files with the same names. Having a lot of experience in the game, I highly recommend that you name each and every file with the YYYYMMDD + (name of camera) + camera’s file name, e.g. 20130906_7D_IMG_1234. If you also scan or photograph old pictures or documents and such, try to get the dates, at least the year + title. Using this format for each file means that there can never be a loss due to same name conflict (although on some scans I had fun once). A side benefit is that files sort automatically by data and camera when lumped together. Fortunately Bridge, Elements, Photoshop and LightRoom do support making these changes — Bridge is my choice.
Camera: CANON 60D and Panasonic LUMIX (in car, kayak, on beach/swamps). Scanner: Epson Perfection V700 PHOTO

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Have you tries Picasa?
http://picasa.google.com/

Jerry

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I tried Picasa off and on, but for reasons I can’t recall, did not continue to use it. Perhaps I was wary of Google’s focus on sharing and putting things online. I have over 300GB of images, and am still working on how I want to handle online storage. (Since I have a hosted personal site with virtually unlimited storage, I’m looking at a product called ownCloud, which is a sort of personal Dropbox. I see that Picasa 3 has the ability to work with selected local files. That might be helpful for quick reviews of the image catalog.

Obviously, Picasa does not have the image manipulation tools of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. The complication with using two separate systems is keeping them synched. I far as I can tell, new files created in Elements Editor would not automatically be updated in Picasa. Nor does Picasa offer a link to an external editor (such as Elements).

Thx.

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The complication with using two separate systems is keeping them synched. I far as I can tell, new files created in Elements Editor would not automatically be updated in Picasa. Nor does Picasa offer a link to an external editor (such as Elements).

You use the menu item tools/folder manager to tell Picasa which folders you want it to monitor. So any folder which has the edited files from Elements would automatically update. For example, I transfer my pics using Nikon software and it allows me to create a backup folder (which I subsequently copy to DVD), but I have switched off monitoring on this folder so I don’t see it in Picasa. The editing tools are basic but not bad (depends on what you want to do) but I haven’t yet found any software to manage my pics as good as Picasa. You don’t have to upload any pics online if you don’t want to. I do, but not many and just to let specified people to look at them.

Another useful tool in Picasa is adding tags – it’s easy to use and again, I haven’t found anything else to do this as well (well not free anyway).

Oh, and by the way, I would turn off face recognition. It’s very good but if you have a lot of faces it becomes unmanageable. I also found it added contacts to my Gmail account – not good when the people concerned are dead or who I no longer know! That last could probably have been turned off, but I didn’t want face recog anyway,

Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell

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I tried Picasa off and on, but for reasons I can’t recall, did not continue to use it. Perhaps I was wary of Google’s focus on sharing and putting things online. I have over 300GB of images, and am still working on how I want to handle online storage. (Since I have a hosted personal site with virtually unlimited storage, I’m looking at a product called ownCloud, which is a sort of personal Dropbox. I see that Picasa 3 has the ability to work with selected local files. That might be helpful for quick reviews of the image catalog.

Obviously, Picasa does not have the image manipulation tools of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. The complication with using two separate systems is keeping them synched. I far as I can tell, new files created in Elements Editor would not automatically be updated in Picasa. Nor does Picasa offer a link to an external editor (such as Elements). Thx.

Accesss-mdb shows how to specify the folders that are automatically monitored for changes. You can also highlight a picture in Picasa and use file > open files in an editor and the picture will be opened in what ever application you have set as default for the file type. Photoshop elements for example.

Jerry

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You can also right click on any picture in Picasa and select open with and all available editors should show up.

Jerry

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I second, third or fourth (whatever it is) the big P from G. It works in concert as a fine-tunable passive organizer with just about any editing program(s). I think big collections of photos cooked the proverbial gooses of most of the built in organizers and if one has more than one like I do it’s a waste of resources to make each one keep its own database and they all seem a lot slower than Picasa so I haven’t used a built in one since Paint Shop Pro X.
As far as I know, nothing is going online either unless you set up the Web Album feature and use it.

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I am not knocking Picasa. It has improved immensely since GOOGLE acquired it. Two issues (one shared now by ADOBE):
A) What happens when you don’t have internet access?
b) Have you been following GOOGLE’s court arguments AGAINST internet privacy?

Also, my speed and the size of the holdings I have (over 45,000 images) militate against an on-line solution. Besides, I’ve been using Adobe products since they came out with this idea of “layers.” Late 1980s I believe.

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I am not knocking Picasa. It has improved immensely since GOOGLE acquired it. Two issues (one shared now by ADOBE):
A) What happens when you don’t have internet access?
b) Have you been following GOOGLE’s court arguments AGAINST internet privacy?

Also, my speed and the size of the holdings I have (over 45,000 images) militate against an on-line solution. Besides, I’ve been using Adobe products since they came out with this idea of “layers.” Late 1980s I believe.

A) Picasa works fine with no internet access
B) Unless you upload pictures to Picasa web, I am not aware of any privacy concerns with Picasa.

Picasa runs locally and is not an “on line solution”

Jerry

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I’ve been using Adobe products since they came out with this idea of “layers.” Late 1980s I believe.

Nothing about using Picasa changes that use unless you are heavily reliant on Adobe Bridge because that is what Picasa can accomplish so well, not any of the editing tasks. The one exception may be if you’re using LightRoom to manage a lot of RAW photos.

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Completing nine years of circulation is no mean task. Great. To think that I was a subscriber to WS for most of these nine years makes me smile with pride. Hats off to the entire team. Mr.Langa’s contribution in this is unforgettable. My sincere appreciations to the entire team – D.BALAJI, India

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Thanks all. Two more questions, while on the digital imaging topic. Looking for better Kodachrome scanning on my Nikon CoolScan 5000 than what came with the box. Also Canon’s Digital Image Pro does a fairly nice job of letting you make quick initial fixes for RAW images. Any equivalents?

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Tracey, getting back to the original topic, I’ll bet if you count the history of the Langa List, Windows Secrets would be older than nine years! I joined the Langa List a very long time ago.

As far as scanning, I’m not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but I use Scannito to do scanning. It is a good, feature-rich program for scanners.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Tracey, getting back to the original topic, I’ll bet if you count the history of the Langa List, Windows Secrets would be older than nine years! I joined the Langa List a very long time ago.

As far as scanning, I’m not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but I use Scannito to do scanning. It is a good, feature-rich program for scanners.

Brian’s Buzz predates Windows Secrets as well. Woody Leonhard has had an Office and a Windows website for many years as well. We have much more than nine years of history, if all the contributors’ previous newsletters and blogs are counted!

-- rc primak

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Considering it is November 4th today, this is very late, but my inbox of Windows Secrets “to read” has only just been tackled! Belated congratulations on over 9 years. Pretty sure I’ve been around for all of them, back to the days you were “wopr.com”. I learn at least one new and relevant thing from every edition and don’t think I could have survived Windows without you!

As an aside, aren’t the Rockies magnificent! So glad you spent time there. My favourite trip was a flight to Edmonton, Alberta; then, driving to Jasper and down through the Rockies to Banff, followed by heading further west to the coast and Vancouver, B.C. Truly awe-inspiring scenery! I bet you have fantastic photo memories!

Thanks to you and the whole team for this wonderful newsletter and service.

A huge fan,

Linda

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Thanks to you and the whole team for this wonderful newsletter and service.

You’re also part of the team, Linda, if the Forums are included.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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