Photology: finding photos made easy (and win a free copy, too!)

For someone like me, who keeps downloading travel photos onto my computer in multiple folders, all named “to sort 1”, “to sort 2”, “to sort 37” etc, and of course, never gets down to sorting any of them, and then can never find any photos when needed — Photology is a God send.

It’s a brilliant piece of software that, once installed, can find any photo you want, based on almost any detail you can remember. The detail could be something as simple as the color in the photo, the time/date you took it, or whether the photo has faces, sky, flowers or beach in it. Essentially, the program can determine the content of your photos and filter them accordingly so that you can find the one you want with the minimum amount of time and energy. Isn’t that cool!?

We’ve got a handful of licenses for Photology that we’ll be giving away after the write-up. Read through to find out how you can get your hands on one!

I thought trying out this program would be a good way to find a few photos I seem to have lost forever, and maybe even attempt to organize them in some way.

As soon as you install the Photology software, it scans the default folders on your computer that contain photos. It also gives you the opportunity to add or delete folders, in case there are some you don’t want it to search through, or if you want to add some from an external drive.

Once installed, it opens a full-screen that displays all your photos — that’s when I realized I have 1158 unsorted (*GASP*) photos on my computer! My plans of attempting to sort them have just been thrown out of the window. Besides, with this program, I really might never have to! Never having to worry about setting those excruciating hours aside to sort all your photos is such a relief!

The program finds them in groups, so for example if I want to show a friend all my photos from my Formentera trip in May 2006, all I need to do is search for May 2006 and they will all come up — along with the other stuff I did in May 2006 of course, but who cares about those few extra photos.

I think it’s pretty smart that it can identify photos by date, but I’m assuming it identifies them based on the date you put them onto your computer rather than the date you shot them. (Photos are timestamped when the photo is taken. See: exif –Ed.) As a person who waits till her camera memory card is full before she puts the photos onto her computer, this could be a problem for me. BUT, if I have this program, and just to avoid sorting them later, I would make the effort to empty my camera monthly.

What’s also cool, is that you can keep narrowing your search basis certain criteria, depending on what you want to find. For example: I can search for all my beach photos, then narrow it down to the ones taken in the day, then to ones which also have people in them, to ones from June 2007.

Another thing that will actually make you use this program is that it is extremely intuitive and easy to use. You don’t have to read a million instructions — just open the program and play with it for 5-minutes and voila you will be using it to its full efficiency! AND…although it took a while to install on my computer, the search is pretty fast, and what I was pleasantly surprised about was that in the process of handling so many photos at once, it doesn’t make your computer freeze or crash.

The program also offers photo-editing tools, built-in upload to Flickr, and easy photo web-sharing facilities.

The website is quite explanatory and tells you how to use it very clearly through video and screen cast tutorials. It only costs US$39, and can be bought off the website. If you are in two minds, download the trial version and you will know immediately whether you want it or not.

%Gallery-10966%

Are you ready to score a copy of Photology free-of-charge? Follow these instructions below, and the first 50 people will get an early Christmas present.

  1. Make sure your system meets the minimum requirements:
    1. Windows XP SP2 or Vista
    2. 512 MB RAM
    3. 2 GHz processor
    4. 500MB avail. hard disk space
    5. 1024×768 screen resolution
    6. High color, 32-bit display
  2. Go to http://promo.getphotology.com (will redirect to http://promo.enoetic.nl)
  3. Fill in the form
    1. First name, last name
    2. Email
    3. Confirm email
    4. Promo code = F3EB8708
  4. A license key will be emailed to you.
  5. Note that even if you miss out on the promo (limited to the first 50 signups), they can try out Photology for 14 days for free.

Have fun!