As a photographer, I like easy ways of storing, editing and producing digital pictures. As a moderate user of Adobe Photoshop, I have now discovered Picasa, Free Software from Google that allows you to simply catalogue, store and perform some post production enhancements to your digital pictures.

Like many Digital Photographers, you may want duplicates (multiple versions) of your digital pictures, to which you apply various enhancements - cropping, B&W, softening, etc. If you are using Picasa, then you will need to apply some file renaming to ensure your pictures are grouped together: picture original, picture copy1, picture copy2,,, picture copy n. Currently, duplicating a digital picture within Picasa does not produce a filename which preserves the desired filename sequence (ascending sort - alphabetic order) - "Original, Original Copy, Original Copy (2),, Original Copy (n)"

Do not despair. Here is a simple fix that will ensure that your 'CD of GIF images' will playback properly on an inexpensive DVD player ($39.95 at Wal-Mart), which is capable of playing back (like a Slide Show) stored GIF images.

A little background on how Picasa creates GIF file copies on your computer. When you copy/duplicate a file in Picasa it creates the copied file with the following prefix - "Copy of IMAGE nnnn . gif". Since alphabetic sequencing has "C" coming before "I", this means that all of the prefixed files with "Copy of" are saved in your computer [picture] directory ahead of the original GIF images, which all start with "IMGE" or "IMAGE" - Ouch! But you want your entire GIF picture files to start with "IMGE" or "IMAGE", just like they were originally created on your digital camera.

Apply a simple and consistent renaming of these "Copy of" GIF files and you will get the desired playback sequence. Rename these "Copy of" files so that the original filename prefix is preserved - "IMGE" or "IMAGE". Just remove the "Copy of" prefix and add an appropriate ascending numeric sequence suffix to each of the copied files. For example, IF your original GIF file and the Picasa two copies were: IMGE_2787, Copy of IMGE_2787, Copy (2) of IMGE_2787 THEN you would rename the TWO Copy files to get this grouped sequence: IMGE_2787, IMGE_2787-2, IMGE_2787-3

Now you will be sure that the filename sequence will match your desired Slide Show sequence.

You can submit an enhancement request to Picasa to fix the way they name copied files (Adobe has is right!). You can submit your request to: Picasa Help Ticket Submission. The more requests the sooner they fix this inconvenience.