Hello Gale. I do many of the things the answers you already have say. I download pictures to my computer and give them a file name which includes the date the picture was taken and the name of the plant/seedling. I then save them to files by year. I have separated them into files by plant, but that takes some time to set up. While I may resize and/or crop a picture at that time to share it, I try to wait for a day when I am not hybridizing (too rainy, etc.) and spend some time doing so then - - too busy saving pollen and downloading pictures to do that every day. I have a program called FastStone Image Viewer that handles the re-sizing as well as name entry on the picture itself. It can also crop, rotate, etc. While it is not nearly as powerful as PhotoShop, it is free (shareware) and does what I need it to do.
Yes, the pictures as downloaded from my digital SLR are huge files. You can adjust the size in the camera, but bigger files mean more precise colors, etc., so big files are good. Depending on the amount of storage you have available on your computer, you have a couple of options. First, if you have the storage on the computer, use it. If not, the there are more options. Since I have enough storage for a year's worth of pictures, I wait for the "off season" and download all of the images for that year onto an external drive in a folder for that year. Once that is done, I go back to the computer and pick out only the best two-to-five pictures for each plant and delete all of the the other pictures. At that time, I crop/annotate/re-size those pictures however I wish and keep them on the computer for quick access. Of course, at some point in time the volume of pictures will exceed what you can handle on your hard drive and even on the external drive, and then more storage or more erasures will be necessary.
Hope this helps,
Larry
