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As storage grows, inexpensive programs can help PC users keep track of picture

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Why you can trust SCMP
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I returned to the US recently and stopped in to visit my dear grandma. As she does nearly every time I visit, she walked over to the large china cabinet in the dining area, put on her reading glasses, and began rummaging through one of the cabinet's large drawers.

'Have I shown the pictures of all the grandkids?' she asks, producing a small envelope of 3x5 prints.

Ah, if it were still so easy for me. My large drawer is actually a 1.2-gigabyte hard disk, a dozen Zip disks, and several CD-Roms.

Those with a fancy new digital still camera know exactly what I am talking about. In the digital world, there are no shoe-boxes full of negatives, and no photo albums that let you browse through family snapshots.

If you use digital images in your business, then you really know what I'm talking about: time spent trying to find the images you need is money down the drain.

So what do you do when your disk is brimming with digital pictures, when you cannot find your snaps of last year's vacation, or when browsing through pictures involves hours of opening images one at a time? Get a database.

There are four image databases for individual users - Cumulus, made by Canto, ImageAXS by Digital Arts and Sciences, CompuPic (CPIC) by Photodex, and Fetch, which has been released in a greatly improved form as Extensis Portfolio.

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