Photos Forever Review MY HARD DRIVE CRASHED AND I LOST ALL MY PICTURES! Yeah, we've all heard it before from some poor soul who never quite got around to backing things up. The fact is, the rest of us are probably just lucky that it hasn't happened to us -- YET. The problem is that digital photography is just so easy; no film to worry about so we shoot until the memory card is full then dump it on the PC and start over again. The next thing you know is you have about 5 gigs worth of pictures in a tangled mess all over your hard drive. Now to back them up, you're faced with the Herculean task of sorting thousands of files and trying to find the best way to fit them on a group of CDs or DVDs. No wonder everyone leaves them on their hard drives. Help has finally arrived. Photos Forever allows you to quickly find any or all of the image files on your hard drive and back them up over a series of CDs or DVDs. After a few mouse clicks, all you'll need to do is feed blank CDs or DVDs into your PC. With Photos Forever, you can forget about the endless sorting, searching and calculations you used to have to do when backing up files. Please note that you do need a drive that will write to blank CDs or DVDs to use this programs. If you have such a drive, you may want to download Photos Forever and follow along with the tutorial. With Photos Forever, a hard drive crash, doesn't have to take all your pictures with it. Find Photos Tedious and boring is a good way to describe finding your photos manually. Photos Forever quickly finds your files and gives you complete control over which ones you want to back up. The following examples assume you have digital images on your hard disk drive and in the "My Pictures" folder. Below is a reduced screen shot of the opening page of Photos Forever. When opening Photos Forever, you're given three backup options, new, all, or selected. If this is the first backup you've done, all of your photos will be considered new so select that option. Clicking next brings up the Step 1 page where file selection is done. Photos Forever will now select digital images and display them as thumbnails a box at the center of the window. Files are selected based on which of five checkboxes are clicked. The options are: "My Pictures" CD/DVD Camera/Removable Drive Mapped Networked Drives Custom folders To see how the thumbnails work: 1) Uncheck all of the boxes and you'll notice all of the thumbnails vanish. 2) Click on "My Photos" box and only photos from that folder will appear. 3) Click on any of the thumbnails and a larger image will appear to the right of the thumbnail window. Information on the picture is shown beneath the larger version. 3) Click off the "My Photos" option and the thumbnails will again disappear. Photos Forever tries to automatically locate digital images on your hard drive and places the paths to these directories in the custom folder. To modify this, click the edit button and a list of folders will appear. To delete all of the selected paths, select the top one and click the remove button until they are all gone. To get these paths back, click on the suggest folders button and the paths will reappear. An example is shown below. You can add or subtract directories as you wish; for this example, all of the paths except those shown in the image above were removed. You can remove individual images or entire subfolders by clicking on a thumbnail and selecting the appropriate check box found under the large version of the thumbnail. Continue this until you're satisfied that all of the files you want backed up are checked. Click next. Ready to Archive The ready to archive page tells you how many pictures you selected, shows thumbnails of them, and tells you how many CDs or DVDs are required to backup the pictures. You also can select the drive to use if you have more than one writable drive as shown in the image below. Other checkboxes allow you to rename all of the files, test write first or to include the Photo Forever installer. For this example we will leave all three options unchecked. Click next Burning A pop up box will appear and ask you to install a writable CD or DVD. Burning will start after you click the continue button or once the program finds the blank CD. As burning continues, each image burned will appear along with a progress bar telling you how far along the process has gone. When the first disk is full, it will be finalized and a pop up box will prompt you to install another disk until all of the images have been backed up. You can run other programs while the backup is in progress. After the last disk has been burned and finalized, you will be asked if you want to print out an image key list. The image key list is a series of printed pages containing thumbnails of every picture you backed up. For the 2400+ pictures backed up in the example, 15 printed pages would be required. For the example, we will unclick the selection box and click next. Backup Complete The finished page tells you how many images you backed up and gives you the option to print CD/DVD labels using CD label maker which you can also download from this site. Click finish and the program will terminate. Your digital pictures are now safely backed up on a series of CDs or DVDs. Conclusion Digital pictures no longer have to be hidden from view in obscure folders on your hard drive, or lost forever when hardware failures occur. With Photos Forever, selecting the photos to back up is done with a few clicks and the backup only requires you to feed blank CDs/DVDs into the drive. Gone forever are the tedious searches to find pictures littered all over your hard drive. No longer waste your time calculating which files will fit best on a CD. Easy to use with a low registration fee, Photos Forever solves your photo backup problems - FOREVER. To register the program, press the buy button when prompted and the following pop up box will appear. Clicking the "Buy Code" button will open a purchase page on your default web browser. You may want to open your browser BEFORE clicking the "Buy Code" button to make sure the proper page comes up. Download the trial version by clicking on the button below. I hope you find the program useful and would like to hear your comments at - The Genie - News || Reviews || Utilities || Home/Office || Web Tools || Web Utils || Graphics || Security || Games || Other Categories || Program List || FAQ || Forum || About Us || Contact Us || Home Strategy Games || Action Games || Puzzle Games || Card Games ||