From Camera to Yearbook Page

Part 1:  How to Download, Select, Organize and  Enhance Photos

Collectively we’ll likely take several thousand photos this year, of which several hundred will make it into the Yearbook.

How do we ensure that the very best photos are easy to find when someone needs them?

There’s no perfect answer, but following the procedures below will help a lot!

Downloading to “Shared / Photos”

Shared / Photos is a folder on the AHS fileserver where all yearbook staff can download and edit photos.

ALL PHOTOS THAT ARE MEANT FOR THE YEARBOOK MUST BE STORED HERE or in your specific page folders!!!

Here’s how to do it:

Log in under your Yrbk# login.

 

 

Open Student Shortcuts XP on your desktop if it’s there

 

OR

 

Run “My Computer” (Windows explorer)

Go to the Student Drive (I:)

Open the “Yrbk” folder

 

Run the YrbkDrive program.  After messing with your screen for a few seconds, it gives you access to the Yearbook drive (Q drive).

Run My Computer, and go into the Yearbook drive.  NEVER save anything under your login drive (G drive, the one with the X through it above).

In the Yearbook drive, you should see 2 folders.  All photos get downloaded into Shared/Photos or Shared / Pages.

 

 

 

 

Under Shared/ Photos, there are many subfolders such as Staff and Lunch.

 

A hugely important task is to decide which folder(s) to download to.

Plug your camera into the USB port, and choose to Open Folder to View Files Using Windows Explorer.

View the pics as thumbnails, and ask yourself “what are the main topics of the photos?” = “What Folders should they go in?”

Maybe you can find an existing folder which the pics fit into – just go ahead and download.

Maybe you can find the right major category (like Lunch), but you might need to make your own subfolder (like “Turtle Race Caf Oct. 10”)

Maybe you need to make a brand new category.  E.g. you might have some basketball pics, and no-one has downloaded any sports yet.  So…

  1. make a top level folder name Sports (it’s already there in the example)
  2. In the Sports folder, create a subfolder e.g. Golf
  3. Sometimes it makes sense to create sub-sub-folders!  In the example, the Golf sub-folder has sub-sub-folders for each gender.
  4. Each separate photo-shoot should have its own folder.  Not shown in the example are separate folder for each Girl’s gold event.

Remember:

·         Doing a careful job deciding what folders to make and use makes it much easier to find your pics again, for you, the editors and anyone else who might want to use them.

·         You often need to download to more than one folder.  A shoot of an event may also have some great staff pics in it.

·         If you’re shooting just for your assigned page, you can download to the appropriate folder under Shared/Pages, but otherwise always use Shared/Photos

 

Okay, download to the appropriate folders.  This means selecting the desired files (try Ctrl-click to select multiple pics), then selecting copy, going to the correct folder under Shared/ Photos, and selecting Paste.

When you’ve got all your pics downloaded to appropriate folders, unplug the camera.  Double check to make sure they’re REALLY downloaded, and if so, delete them from the camera.

Go to the download folders, and view them as thumbnails. 

  • Right away you will see some to delete. 
  • Others might belong in a different folder, such as the pic of 2 teachers in among the Gr 12 Terry Fox pics.  Here you’d make a top level Staff folder and then drag or cut & paste the pic to it, so someone working on staff pages will be more likely to find it.

 

Now to thin them out.  Double-click the first pic to start a preview show.  Go through each photo, and ask yourself, is this a REALLY good photo?  If not, delete it, because it’ll save us a lot of time when we’re sorting and uploading.  Only keep pics which:

·         Are exceptionally good visually, OR

·         Capture a special moment, OR

·         Are of people or events that are hard to get other shots of.  E.g. you might have a pic of the principal having fun with students at a dance.  It may not be perfectly exposed, but it’s a unique moment, so keep it.

 

Change the filenames to help identify people etc.

For instance, I’d simply rename IMG_9644.jpg to “parents students register.jpg” (it should already have been moved to the Gr 9 folder).  DO NOT CHANGE the .JPG extension, including the dot!!!

Open each of the remaining photos in Photoshop, making careful adjustments to Levels etc. where needed.  Don’t overdo it!

Elementary PhotoShop

 

 

Review Questions

Oh yeah, how do you get the pictures on a Yearbook page?  That’s a big question, to be elaborated on elsewhere, but basically it goes like this:

  1. finalize the picture – do all cropping, level adjustment, Photoshopping etc.
  2. Save as a Jpeg (in the appropriate Pages folder)
  3. Upload to YearTech Online (the online website from Jostens where we actually build our yearbook pages)
  4. Insert the photo into a picture box on your page.