It’s sometimes easy to underestimate the importance of a good tag and filtering process. If done right this can be a huge time saver. It’s also handy for archiving; when you return to these photos after weeks, months or years have passed you are immediately able to see the original tags you applied.

1. Loupe View
The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure you’re in Loupe view of your photos. This allows you to easily view each individual photo as you scroll them. To do this, simply hit the E key on your keyboard, or go to View > Loupe. Now, starting with the first photo in your series, you can simply use the left and right arrow keys to scroll through the Filmstrip (the scrolling list of photos at the bottom of the screen).

2. Flags, Stars and Colors
Lightroom offers you several options to tag and filter your photos. One thing to keep in mind when sorting through these filtering options is whether or not the tag is global. If it is global, it will be recognized by Lightroom regardless of what folder, collection or catalog the photo resides in. If it’s not global, the tag you apply will only be visible within the folder or collection that you are viewing at the time.

• Flags – Quick and easy way to indicate whether a photo is to be kept or deleted. Not global.
  • Flagged (Hit P key) – Marks photo as a keeper
  • Unflagged (Hit U key) – Removes any previously applied tag.
  • Rejected (Hit X key) – Marks photo as rejected
• Stars (Hit 1-5 on keyboard, or 0 to remove stars) – Fairly straightforward way to indicate whether a photo is “meh” or if it’s “AWESOME”! Stars are globally recognized.
• Colors (Hit 6-9 on keyboard) – Nifty way to assign a group to a set of photos. For example, all Green photos need to be cropped, all Red photos need to be changed to black and white, etc. Colors are globally recognized as well.

One thing to keep in mind is that Photoshop can also recognize global tags. So, if you have just flagged a photo in Lightroom and opened in Photoshop for editing, when you save the photo it is automatically added to your Lightroom catalog but it will not retain the Flag that you had previously applied. Photoshop does retain all Star ratings and Color labels that you have applied, but not Flags.

3. Filtering Fun!
Now that all the “hard work” is done (bless your soul), it’s easy to use the filter options in the toolbar to display only certain sets of photos. Simply click on the filtering method of your choice to display only the photos with those tags.

Tagging and filtering has become the very first thing I do with my photos after they are imported. It’s especially useful if you are importing a large amount of photos at one time as it helps you narrow down the best photos to a manageable list.

Other articles in this series

• Adobe Lightroom Workflow – Part 1 – Importing Photos

However, remote access for my Mac has been a different story. I recently began using the free version of LogMeIn.com with much success. So seeing LogMeIn.com at the top of Lifehackers “Hive Five” list validates the opinions of the readers.

The benefits of LogMeIn.com is that it is cross-platform and allows you Internet browser-based access, so you don’t have to install any software on the client machine; only a small application is require to be installed on the target machine. Also, it’s free!

Setup
First, I walked through their painless registration process to create my account. Then, on the Mac I wanted to connect to I installed the required application and set an access password. That’s it. No ports to forward or firewall settings to battle with.

Connect
From any Windows or Mac machine, I simply login to my LogMeIn.com account, type in the access code for the Mac I want to connect to, and I’m in! A little notification window appears to let anyone who may be sitting in front of the computer I’m remotely controlling that it is being accessed via LogMeIn.com.

The user who is currently logged in to the target computer is not logged out, so LogMeIn.com would be an excellent option for remotely assisting a friend, family member, or client. So long as they don’t mind taking a few moments to install the required application to admit remote access.

VPN connections (virtual private networks) are wonderful. I use one to connect to work several times per week. I can do all sorts of handy things: surf the network, grab files, print to my office. But one annoyance has been bugging me for a good while now, and I’ve just been putting up with it. Seemingly at random moments, the VPN connection box would just pop up for no reason.

I finally got tired of clicking the cancel button, and decided to figure out just what was causing this problem. Turns, out that Internet Explorer was the culprit, even though I only use Firefox.

VPN Popping up and Internet Explorer

Like I said, even though I don’t use Internet Explorer, it was still causing the VPN connection box to pop up. Internet Explorer was considering the VPN connection as a default connection. It’s no wonder that this was giving me trouble since IE is also so tightly weaved into the operating system. It also explains why I was seeing this even though I only use Firefox.

To keep the vpn connection box from popping up, all you have to do is open up Internet Explorer, click Tool > Options and then click on the Connections tab.

On the Connections tab, select the VPN connection listed under “Dial-up and VPN Connections” and click the remove button. Yeah, that screen is from Internet Explorer 6. If you’re using IE7 (you poor thing!) I imagine the process would be similar. Just find the Options window and look for connections setting.

I have to maintain a rather old website that consists of nothing but flat HTML files. Until I get around to finally updating it to dynamic, database driven web site, I’m stuck with editing several dozen complex web pages. Every so often, I have to edit or create a new page that consists of long lists. While lists themselves aren’t complicated, it’s very time consuming to write all the HTML associated with a list of many items. Thankfully, I call upon a little trick that I’ve learned that uses Excel to write 99% of the code for me!

To get the most “bang for your buck” out of this trick, it helps to already have a list of items in excel. If you don’t, it isn’t a big deal. You’ll just have a little extra work ahead of you. But don’t worry, if you’re list has more than ten or so items, it’s probably still worth it to break out the Excel and put it to work.

Before we open up Excel, though, let’s do a little bit of planning. Open up your favorite web page editor (I’m using Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition) and create just your very first list item with HTML. We’re going to use this as our template in Excel. For example, my code looks like this:

<ul>
  <li><a href="http://www.examplesite.com">The B-52’s - Rock Lobster</a></li>
</ul>

As you can see in the code above, a list like this that has many items is going to have repetitive HTML tags and attribute code. For example, the <li> </li> tags will be in every list item. Also, the anchor tag and href, <a href=""></a> will be the same for each list item as well. Instead of writing this code over and over or doing multiple Copy and Pastes, we’ll let Excel do the heavy lifting and write all this code for us.

Open up your list in Excel. If your list isn’t in Excel, a quick Copy and Paste should do the trick. We’re going to break up the code we wrote into sections. Insert columns before and after your list items to make room for the HTML code. For my example, I typed the opening list item tag and the opening anchor tag with the href: <li><a href=" in the first column, first row (cell A1). Between the URL’s and song titles that were already in my list, I inserted another column, and typed the end quote and angled bracket for the opening anchor tag: "> In the column after my song title, I typed the ending anchor and list item tags: </a></li>

In the very next column, we need to create a quick formula that concatenates (connects) all of the columns to the left. In my example, columns A – E will be concatenated. Here’s the formula to input in the last column: =CONCATENATE(A1,B1,C1,D1,E1). You’ll notice that if you enter this formula correctly, all of the columns to the left will be connected together. This will make copying and pasting much easier and will also resulting in cleaner code (skipping the concatenation usually results in unneeded spaces within your lists).

Now for the fun part! Select cell A1 and double click the small square located in the bottom right corner. This will populate that entire column with the contents of cell A1 where ever there is a value inside an adjacent cell. Do this for the other cells that have HTML in them as well as the column that has our concatenation formula.

That’s it! Now all you have to do is copy and paste the column with the concatenate formula into your web editor, inside the opening and closing (un)ordered list tag. Repeat these steps for all of your long lists and you’ll shave a lot of time off of your work!

Until now, we’ve had to login our old Hotmail accounts every month or so to check mail from friends (if we can still call them that!) who refuse to update their contact list, and to keep Hotmail from erasing our account data because of the lack of activity.

Well, Hotmail has finally decided to add POP3 support. This means we can now add and receive our Hotmail emails in our beloved Gmail accounts or any mail client that supports POP3.

First off, let’s take a look at the info:

• POP Server: pop3.live.com
• SMTP Server: smtp.live.com
• Incoming Port: 995
• Outgoing Port: 25
• SSL Required? Yes
• Authentication Required? Yes
• TLS/SSL Required? Yes
• User Name: Your Full Email Address/Windows Live ID (Example: geekinspired@hotmail.com)
• Password: The password you use to login to your Hotmail account

Add Hotmail To Gmail
In your Gmail account, click on the Settings link in the top right corner, then choose Accounts from the secondary list of options.

Send Mail with Hotmail Address
Under the Send mail as area, click on the link to Add another email address you own (Even though you might not want to send mail through your Hotmail address, Gmail wants you to go ahead and add this info). From the pop-up menu that appears, simply enter your name and your Hotmail address. A verification code will then be sent to your Hotmail address, so you’ll need to login to your account (one last time!) and get that code. Once the code is verified, you’re all setup to send mail through your Hotmail account.

Get Mail From Hotmail
Next we’ll want to take a look at the Get mail from other accounts area and click on the Add a mail account you own link. You’ll get a new pop-up where you’ll add your Hotmail address again. Click Next and enter in your username, password, POP server (pop3.live.com), port number (995), and make sure to check the option that says “Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail.” The other options on this screen are optional.

Click the Add Account button and that’s it. You’re all set! Of course, you might want to send a test email from your Gmail to your Hotmail account to verify that everything’s working correctly.

Of course, after you do this it’s pretty much guaranteed that your so-called friends will finally update their contact list with your Gmail info. So, enjoy catching all of your Hotmail spam in your Gmail inbox!

Here I will outline a better way to have a copy of this content for easy printing. It just takes a little bit of patience and time, but you end up with your favorite website’s content in a flexible format that can either be printed or transferred to a handheld device for easy reading.

Please note that this should only be used for personal use and not for illegal offline distribution of any kind. Please protect the rights of the authors of online content.

1. Copy Content from Web Page
We’ll start by copying the desired content of a web page and pasting it into Word. Typically, you’ll want to position your cursor to the immediate left of the article title/heading and click and drag straight down the page while still holding down your mouse button. Keep dragging downward until you get to the last word in the article (or the location where you want to stop copying).

Depending on the layout of the page you’re copying, it may be tricky to copy the content while avoiding any unwanted advertisements or stray icons/photos. If there are numerous ads or other obstacles within the article that you do not wish to copy, you may find it easier to copy portions at a time instead of all the content at once.

Once you have either the segment or the entire article selected, copy the content (cmd/ctrl+c) and go to your Word document. Simply paste (cmd/ctrl+v) the content within your Word document. You should see all the content, including both text and images, that you intended to copy.

2. Arrange Layout
Depending on what all was copied from the web page, it may be necessary to rearrange the layout or add and delete certain elements or content. You may want to spend a few moments just quickly browsing through the article to make sure that everything is in order.

Repeat the above steps for each article you wish to copy. Continue pasting the articles one after another into your Word document.

3. Change Article Titles to Headings
In order for our Table of Contents to work, we’ll need to insure the title/heading of the article is correctly formatted as a Heading within Word. Make sure the Formatting toolbar is visible (View > Toolbars > Formatting).

Select the title/heading of the article. Make sure that only the text of the title is selected and no extraneous spaces or lines are selected. From the Style drop down menu in the Formatting toolbar (the drop down menu to the immediate left of the Font drop down), choose Heading 1.

If there are sub-titles in the articles you are copying, choose Heading 2 for them.

4. Create Table of Contents
Go back to the very beginning of your document and press Return a few times to add a few lines of spacing before your first article. We’re creating room for where your Table of Contents will be placed.

Go to Insert > Reference > Index and Tables and choose the Table of Contents tab. You have a few display options for how your Table of Contents, mostly regarding whether or not to show the page numbers, how to align them, and if they will be active links within the document. To get the most out of your Table of Contents, I would recommend using hyperlinks as this adds easy navigation within the Word document and the PDF version.

At this point, you can save your document and have a working copy of your favorite website complete with a Table of Contents. However, we can take this a step further and convert it to PDF.

5. Convert to PDF
The easiest way to do this is by simply using the tools provided with Adobe Acrobat. Just use the Convert to Adobe PDF command in the Adobe PDF toolbar within Word.

If you don’t have access to Acrobat, you can use free tools (doPDF) to create a virtual PDF printer for your computer. Simply install the software, go to File > Print like you normally would, and choose the virtual PDF printer from the printer drop down menu.

Anyway, I recently needed to generate a list of every folder and file that is in a particular directory. Windows XP doesn’t offer a way to do this and I’m not aware that Vista does either. So, to DOS I turned once again to make this list. It only required typing one little command and, when it was done, I had a nice little text file that presented my list in a fully expanded tree.

How to List Every File and Folder in a Directory with Tree

To create such a list for yourself, follow these simple instructions:

1. Click Start > Run (or press Windows key + R) to open the Run dialog box.
2. In the Run dialog box, type ‘cmd’ (without the quotes) and click OK. A black window with a command prompt will appear.
3. At the prompt, type the following:
   
   tree "c:\targetdirectory" > "c:\mydirectorytree.txt" /A /F


Note: Replace ‘targetdirectory’ with the directory from which you want to make your list. Replace ‘mydirectorytree.txt’ with the directory in which you want to save the list, as well as the file name you wish to use for your text file.

4. Click the Enter key.
5. The prompt will move down to the next line, giving the false appearance that nothing happened. You should find your text file in the directory you indicated. Now you can archive the list, or print it out, or do anything you might do to a text file.

This might seem a little foreign if you’ve never or rarely used a DOS prompt. Just practice with a couple of directories and I think you’ll get the hang of it.

DOS Command: Tree

Let’s break this down just a bit further to make sure you understand. Here’s the example I used just a moment ago:

tree "c:\targetdirectory" > "c:\mydirectorytree.txt" /A /F

Starting from the left:

• tree – This indicates that we are executing the tree command, which can list all folders, subfolders, and ever file in those folders. This list is in the form of a directory tree, which is used to show how the folders are organized.
• "c:\targetdirectory" – This indicates which folder you want to use as the starting point for your tree list. It can be any folder or even just a drive letter (such as c:\ Be careful with listing entire drives, it can take a while and can create a fairly massive text file).
• > (the ‘greater than’ symbol) – The ‘Greater Than’ symbol allows us to take the results of the command, which is everything to the left of the symbol, and place it into a file.
• "c:\mydirectorytree.txt" – Since we’re putting our list into a text file with the ‘Greater Than’ symbol, we have to include a place for it to be stored. You can use any drive or directory available to you, just be sure to remember where you’ve put it!
• /A – This is called a “switch.” You can think of a switch as an extra feature that can be turned on or off. Each command has their own set of switches and, even though the switches look the same among different commands, they most often do different things. This particular switch changes the character set that’s used to draw the “tree” (the lines that indicate a change in hierarchy). You can experiment with not using this switch by removing it from the command all together to see what you prefer.
• /F – This switch lists all files that are within the folders and subfolders. If you wish to just see folders and not the files within them, leave this switch out.

That’s all there is to it. This can be especially handy for web developers who have just been given a new site to manage. Network Admins can use this for more sneaky reasons, such as discovering the existence of questionable files. If you can think of some other handy way to use this powerful DOS command, leave a comment!

If you’d like to learn about a similar but more powerful command, you should check out the DOS Command XCOPY.

The starting point of any workflow is the importing of the files. (Yes, I know the actual starting point is the creation of the photos, but for the sake of staying within the scope of this article, let’s agree that our starting point begins with the import). This is the foundation of your workflow, getting your photos imported to relevant locations on your hard drive and named accordingly.

This article details the steps I take when importing files in Lightroom. There are no definitive right ways to import your files, so I am by no means preaching the gospel here. I’m just offering suggestions on what has helped me over the past few years in organizing my photos for effective use and archiving.

Select Files to Import
One way or another, you’ve got to tell Lightroom which files you want to import. There are several different ways you can do this. If your photos are still on your digital camera’s memory card, you can either connect your camera directly to your computer or connect your memory card to a USB card reader. Simply connect your camera or card reader, pull up Lightroom, and go to File > Import Photos from Device…

If your images are already on your computer’s hard drive, you can easily import them as well by going to File > Import Photos from Disk… and selecting the folder where they are located.

Master the Import Dialog Box
Once you’ve selected the files you wish to import into Lightroom, you’ll be presented with a rather large import dialog box. While it may seem intimidating at first, it’s actually a very straight-forward and logical arrangement of options for importing your photos. Let’s take a closer look at each of these options (please refer to the image to the right).

1. File Handling and Location
The first option is asking how you want Lightroom to handle these files. Here you have a few different choices to make:

• Add photos to catalog without moving – Imports the photo information into Lightroom but leaves your existing photos where they are on your hard drive.
• Copy photos to a new location and add to catalog – Copies your photos to a specified location and imports them into your Lightroom catalog.
• Move photos to a new location and add to catalog – Moves your photos to a specified location and imports them into your Lightroom catalog.
• Copy photos as Digital Negative (DNG) and add to catalog (Recommended) – This option copies your photos as DNG files to a specified location and imports them into your Lightroom catalog.

The Copy to option allows you to specify where you want the photos to be copied or moved to. I typically target my My Pictures folder on a Windows PC, or my Pictures folder on a Mac. This is the most intuitive place to store photos since these folders are pre-designated by either operating system.

2. File Organization
This drop-down menu gives you several options to choose from. My personal favorite is:

By date: 2005/2005-12-17

This setting automatically organizes my photos by the date they were taken. So, there’s no room for error by manually typing in a date. In my particular scenario, the photos I’m importing will be put in the following directory:

Pictures > 2008 > 2008-12-16

Another advantage of organizing your photos in this way is that you can view a list of all your images by the date they were taken and determine what is to be imported. Using the checkboxes beside the dates you can select which photos you want to import. By selecting a specific date you can view all photos taken on that date and select individual photos to import. Right-clicking on a date will also allow you to rename the target directory.

3. Backup Option
Speaking as one who has lost images before (either due to hard drive failure or hasty file deletion), I want to emphasize the importance of backing up your files. Selecting this checkbox allows you to create a copy of all imported files to an external hard drive. This way you immediately have a backup of your files before you even start working with them. While you’re configuring a backup scheme, you may want to consider a remote backup service such as Mozy Remote Backup.

4. File Naming
Again, Lightroom gives you several options of pre-defined templates you can use as your file naming structure. What I recommend is going to the Edit… option and defining your own.

I personally have my file naming structure set as YYYYMMDD_001.dng (where the “001″ represents a three digit sequence number). This allows me to quickly see the exact date the photo was taken.

Once you’ve defined your custom file naming template, you can save it and that template becomes the default for the next time you import the files.

5. Information to Apply
In this section you can designate the information that is applied to each image that will be imported:

• Develop Settings – A list of presets (black and white, sepia, antiqued, etc.) that will be applied to all photos. This is the one option I’ve never used in the import dialog simply because I like being able to easily view the original version of each photo and apply the preset I think most appropriate.
• Metadata – Similar to the File Naming Template mentioned in the previous step, this allows you to create a metadata template to embed certain information into each photo. I usually setup a template for copyright information that doesn’t change often and leave that template set as the default option.
• Keywords – Specify keywords to be embedded into the photos. One thing to keep in mind is that these keywords will be applied to all photos imported. You can always add and change the keywords once the files are imported into Lightroom.
• Initial Previews – The size of thumbnails that are imported with the photo. Minimal is the default setting and is the fastest method for importing photos; however, while browsing through the photos you may experience lag time because Lightroom may be having to recreate the photos at a larger size as they come into view. Standard means a longer export time but makes browsing medium-sized thumbnails much easier and more fluid. My suggestion? Start with Minimal. If browsing your photos afterward is making your computer lag then step it up to Standard. There is also a 1:1 option, but the import takes even longer and the previews take up more disk space. I’d suggest avoiding the 1:1 setting unless that’s what works best for your workflow.

6. Image Size and Selection
The buttons in this section allow you a quick way to either select all images or deselect all images. The slider bar changes the size of the thumbnails displayed in the window, but has no effect on the information that’s embedded into the photos.

Once you’ve made the appropriate import settings, simply hit the Import button and Lightroom will do the rest!

Over the next few articles we’ll be taking a look at the next steps in the photography workflow inside Lightroom. It’s important not to overlook the import step as it sets the pace for your workflow and overall photo organization.

As you know, everyone needs to backup their computer files. Mozy is the first and only full-featured, remote backup system in the world that’s offered for free. And as of this writing, Mozy also offers unlimited backup for just $4.95 a month (or $54.50 a year). If you have files your care about, or files that you can’t replace, there’s really no excuse to not have everything backed up. Mozy makes it easy!

Mozy offers several backup options to help you pick the best plan. Of course, they are best known for their free service, but if you have more than 2GB of files that you want to keep safe (and it’s really easy to do, now days), you can protect everything you care about for less than $5 per month. So, for the cost of a foot-long sandwich, all of your files and precious family photos can be safe and secure.

Mozy Home Free

Mozy Online Backup: 2GB Free. Automatic. Secure.

MozyHome is probably the perfect choice for most of us who want to backup our home computer or laptop. All you have to do is sign up for an account, install the Mozy software, and pick out the files you want to backup. Mozy will do the rest. Mozy can backup your files automatically or go by a schedule (daily, weekly, monthly).

MozyHome also offers a really nice bandwidth throttling feature, which means you can tell Mozy how much of your Internet connection to use. This means you can work or play like you always do with a minimum impact from running a backup job. Speaking of work, you don’t have to close all of your files for them to be backed up. Mozy can backup open and “locked” files, letting you work unhindered at your convenience.

Mozy Home Unlimited Backups

Many of us have more than 2GB of files that we would like to backup, especially if you have a decent collection of music and digital photos on your computer. Mozy will backup everything you care about, far beyond the 2GB mark, for only $4.95.

Mozy for Macs

Good news, Mac Lovers! Mozy Home for Mac is making its debut as the first unlimited online backup service for the Mac. Thousands of beta customers have worked to bring the power of Mozy to Mac users like you. I personally haven’t gotten to use the Mac version of Mozy, but according to their website it is “sleek, sexy, and… scrumdidliumptious.” Not sure what that last word means but it sure does sound impressive.


Who uses Mozy?

“I prefer Mozy.” – Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal


“Backing up data is a pain in the neck. The only way to make people do it is to automate the process. Mozy does that.” – Daniel Lyons, Newsweek


“Instead of worrying what might happen to your laptop during flight, use Mozy.com to backup your files before you leave.” – Bonnie Ruberg, Forbes


“The other is to use one of a number of online backup service providers such as Box.net, Symantec Online Backup, Carbonite, or Mozy that offer low cost gigabyte-level storage.” – David Strom, PC World


“For a fair price, you can keep a secure offsite backup of your most important files, without worrying about storage limits. If you pay for a year or more at once, you even get a discount. What’s not to love?” – Susie Ochs, MacLife


“Mozy cleverly solves the where-are-my-settings problem with “backup sets” that cover many popular programs, in addition to its automatic coverage of an enormous range of file types.” – Rob Pegoraro, WashingtonPost

“Fortunately, everything worked out as well as it could for both of them after Mr. Wade, a business consultant, reinstalled a clean version of Windows and restored his and his wife’s personal files with Mozy, an online backup service that maintains a copy of all of the files in a distant electronic bunker.” – Peter Wayner, The New York Times


“For online backup, I recommend Mozy Home. For $5 a month, it will automatically backup all the data you can fit on a single PC’s hard drive.” – Lincoln Spector, PC World