Computers and Game Cam's - Need your insight

[SelfGuided]

I had some questions on how fellow TBH'ers manage their computer/game cams.

What's your setup as far as computing and managing your pic's?

I'm under the impression many of you have a dedicated laptop for managing their pic's, if so any recommendations on an inexpensive but reliable setup?

How are you managing your pic's? What programs do you suggest?

Finally, it seems keeping a lot of pic's over a few years would take up a hard drive's space pretty quick...

Appreciate the tips & tricks!

[jwstrother]

As far as a computer, if all you are going to do with this laptop is manage pictures then you could actually get away with buying a 3 or $400 netbook with a large hard drive (250 GB). Without knowing your meaning of "managing" pictures I can't help you on a program to use for managing the pictures, however if you are going to just download them from your game camera to your laptop and look at them your operating system will have a program that will do that.

You will collect a lot of pictures, what I do to save space is only keep pictures with bucks in them and the occasional interesting pic. If you wanted to keep every pic then I would suggest after each hunting season burning all pictures from that year to a disc to save space on your computer.

[SelfGuided]

By managing I was referring to cataloging your pic's; for example as you mentioned you just keep pic's of bucks do you simply keep them in chronological order, or by feeder, or by year, etc. I guess I'm trying to figure out the best way to get organized for best use over time.

[Shake1]

I store mine on the PC with the following file structure, to better manage & catalog them. FYI - I only keep the best pics (eliminate duplicate pics, photos of does, hogs, coons, etc.):

\My Pictures
................\Hunting
..........................\Trail Camera Photos
.................................................. ...\2007 Season
.................................................. ...\2008 Season
.................................................. ...\2009 Season
.................................................. ....................\10-2-09
.................................................. ....................\10-9-09
.................................................. ....................\10-16-09
.................................................. ....................\10-23-09
.................................................. ................................\N. Rd. Feeder
.................................................. ................................\S. Rd. Feeder

The dates I use to create folders are the dates I pull the TC cards out of the camera. The photos themselves actually have date stamps on them.

The trick to doing this is to create the sub-directories "before" you save the files into them (from the SD cards). You can then go through and delete what you do not want, rename a photo to reflect something of interest (e.g. "Big 10pt with split G2, etc.).

[Throwin Darts]

just go pick up a 500 gb external hard drive for about $50 and save all your game cam pics to it. With 500 gb's you can pretty much save every single pic that comes off the cam.

Organize them by feeder and date.

[jturner80]

I have a flash drive for every season and the following year up to May. I keep them in order by dates so if I don't get the chips for a week I will label it ex. 10 /1-6/09