 Well, hello artistic friends and visitors. This is artist Susan Jenkins and welcome to Monet cafe today I'm in my little home studio here today And I thought I would bring you a practical lesson on how to manage and Organize your reference photos, you know We talk a lot in Monet cafe about where you can get good reference images from other people who share their photos And don't have any copyright on them so you can use them to paint But the best by far is to use your own photographs So the great thing is now you can get so many great photographs with just a phone You know, we've got great cameras in our phones But how do we organize all those photos so that when you are ready to find say you want to paint a tree or a beach scene or Whatever I found a lot of the Organizational apps and things that we can get such as Dropbox or Various ones that you can get they don't allow you to tag your photos So that you can organize them and find them very quickly So I'm going to share with you today a a one of the apps that I've found that works If you know of others you can let me know But today let's talk about that and hopefully it'll help you I know it's going to help me to find a photo to paint quickly when I'm in the mood to paint All right, let's get started. Okay, so now I'm going to be showing you a New way I have found to organize and categorize my reference images again This is for your own photographs or photography or whatever and you just want to be able to find them and organize them So when you're ready to paint you can get to it quickly It's actually a Microsoft product or app, but it works with Mac. It works on phones I think it works on Android phone phones I haven't checked that out because I have an iPhone, but it works on my iPad The great thing is you can find it from any device because it's cloud based meaning It's stored on the cloud not on the device So it's actually called One drive. Okay, so you can find it on as an app on your phone on your iPad or on your computers You'll create an account and I've already created an account so I'm not going to go through that but you would create an account and A password and then you have that account then you can upload the same account on your phone or your iPad or whatever So that anything you do on one device gets shared across all of your devices Very handy to have it always accessible like that now it starts with a Basic program, of course, they're going to try to sell you something so once you exceed your limit of Amount of images or data that you've taken up You may have to buy the other one But I don't think it's very expensive and it probably you'll find if you're using it that much you'll find It's worthwhile I've just still got the basic code right here because I've just started right now uploading and I love that I can go on these are just this category right here. This is just all of your photos Okay, but I can go through this happens to be a place in Sarasota, Florida called Selby Gardens That I can go through and just look at all my images if I want I actually can search according to tags to I could search right here trees or flowers or you know, whatever I want to do I actually have uploaded all of my paintings right now These are not very organized, but I can go to my files and see them very neatly Organizing the files now you have to do that yourself, but I'm going to show you how to do that So right now just quickly so you can see the benefit of this Let me scroll down a little bit here get past some of these some artwork again Okay, this was a trip we took to st. Augustine Beach, Florida. Let me just click this wave photo. All right So we've got a nice photo here. I'm like, okay How do I add tags to that so that I can find it as beach or as wave or whatever in the future? If you go to the little info setting right up here and I click that it's gonna show me Here's what's neat the program Automatically add some tags for you. Isn't that neat how the computer? Oops, it's hopping around how the computer can know and get an idea of kind of what this image is so it's gonna automatically add some tags and a lot of programs or These apps and things will do the automatic tags like that, but I wanted to be able to control the tags myself Like if I didn't want just beach I wanted wave so I can right here where it says edit tags I can click edit tag and I can add another tag. Here's a list of tags That I've already made or that it's automatically given But I can add an existing tag. Let me type that in. I'm holding a microphone. So let me set it down You want to do the hashtag? Okay, and then I'm just gonna do wave and Enter okay, so now it has added wave to that photo and it will probably have added wave down here for me to Pick in the future probably update that when I get out of here, okay? So now I've got that tag added to this photo. Okay, so that's just kind of your basic way To take a look at your apps and things like that So I'm still learning this too. So bear with me. I'm just going to go back now We're back in this now if I want to go into up. How did I get these photos in here? Okay, so now you're seeing how practical and handy that could be well. Let me do this real quick Let's just search Beach and see how this works All right I'm gonna search it and it should pull up all of my beach photos again. I haven't uploaded a lot But there's the ones that I've done. Okay, so that's really really nice All right, so now we are in the file section, which is where I am going to be keeping all of my reference images and Organizing my paintings as well. I decided to do it in files instead of the photos section I just like the way it works better. So right here. This is a file. I have for documents I'm actually going to be using that more for my other business that I have but this is a file that I'm using for my Not only my reference images that I'm organizing but also my paintings Sometimes it's nice to have a good place just to keep all of your artwork So it's just always there again The great thing is that this will be across all of your devices So if you have your iPad you want to show somebody all your paintings You can just get on one drive and they'll all be there. All right So let's open up this particular picture file and it's going to have different files Now you can make your own files. You can create a new file You can share files But I have all of my paintings in this file If I open not all of them just ones that I I uploaded the other day There's a there's a lot more but I just have them all in here. You got tons of files Again across all your devices All right, so now I'm going to go back to my pictures. These are a few sketches I just did I thought I'd have a separate file for sketches and a separate one for paintings But this is where we're going to start uploading reference images so that we can tag them and find them easy Now within my reference you you can choose to do this however you want But this is how I did it within my reference image file I'm going to be having separate little files to know certain places if I want to see something really quickly But for example like this Selby Gardens one that I did if I open this one up there They all are from Selby Gardens and I can see them I can tag them just like I did before if I want to click this one and Go to the info tab. It's still uploading. There we go I can it's already given it a tag of plant and flower. That's pretty good, but I could edit it and I could go to Make one hashtag orchid and then it would it would be there. So all right, so let's go back to How do we? Upload new images to these files here, okay? So what I'm going to show you is a couple of different ways you can do it you can of course do it Right from your computer if you have photos on your computer. Let me do a Let me do a new Folder within this we'll just call this one Monet cafe sample Just so you guys can see What this? entails Okay, so we've created a new folder. Here we go Now I can go about Finding things to put in this folder now I'm on my Mac computer right now But I could go to my finder if you're on a Windows computer You can find different things to put into it or different your your Windows Way that you would add photos or look at your photos. You probably just go to your file section Now let's say I wanted to add this particular pastel Picture of these pastels sitting here. I can just drag it into it like that and now it'll show you it's uploading that one Item, okay, so that's a way you can do it from your computer You can do it from an external hard drive. You just have to find that on your computer Okay, so I'm gonna get out of that another thing you can do a great way We have stored a lot of photos and organize them is actually on Facebook Okay, so you can get your photos from Facebook to put into this again Facebook I wish Facebook just tagged your photos. Oh, I was researching this right here. You can see As of this point whenever this was made Dropbox This was an article showing how Dropbox does not allow you to add your own tags But you can use this other program in conjunction with Dropbox to add tags and that was just another extra step So I thought why do we need to do that? So that's why I like this one drive. Okay. Now. I'm in my Facebook I'm just going to go to my photos and then I'm gonna go to my albums and I've gone through a little bit of what you actually mine has a file that shows all of my Instagram photos Sometimes I'll have a photo that's on Instagram, but it's not on Facebook. So you can look at those Again, I had the Selby Gardens when I did. There's my goofy son. There's my son who was at a wedding He actually married his friend and his wife. So that was pretty neat. That's a funny one Anyway, let's find one. Okay. Here's fun and st. Pete. These are some of the ones I think I already did but let me see here. Oh, yeah, there's some cool pictures here Some of these have people in it, but it's a gorgeous photo. So this one right here love that There's my hubby, but um, I found you can't just if you right click this It'll let you save the image, but you it won't be the right kind of image This is really just a thumbnail So if you want to save it for reference image later, you have to actually click it open it up Now you can either click options here and save it. Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Maybe it doesn't let you save it there You can download it, I guess. Yeah, you can download it, but I like to skip that step It's just easier for me to say let me get out of that. Let me go back one. He's so cute. Okay, so I'm gonna right click save as this is just quicker to me and I'm just gonna save it To my pictures folder. I'm gonna call it again. I'll just call it Monet, right? Or yeah, so I can find it. I might have some other things called Beach Okay, so that right now is in my I'm gonna save it to my desktop because I don't have much on my desktop Okay, so save it there and what I would do instead of going back each time and putting it into OneDrive I'd go ahead and go through all your photos that you're gonna save Oh, and that's sky pretty and I'd go ahead and do save as save as save as save as and save them all to a Little folder on your computer. Okay, that you can go back and reference later So now I'm gonna show you how I find that. So right now I want to Open up that particular picture. I'm just opening up where it is in my desktop There it is the little Monet so this will be wherever you saved it Okay, and I'm going to drag it into that file. Okay, so you can see it's uploading the one again You can do this just take it an afternoon or a morning get you a cup of coffee and Just decide to go ahead and organize your reference images I think it might even inspire you to take more photos and Learn to organize them right there like when I go out in my field at night Where I have a bunch of cows and I take some pictures the great thing is OneDrive is right there on my phone Perhaps I can do another video later and show how you do the same thing on your phone or your iPad And once you get in a habit of going ahead and just organize them after you take a few good pictures then you'll be in a constant habit of having a Reference library of your own photography with your own tags so you can find it at all times I've been hunting for so long to find a good way to do this and Adding these tags is going to be the trick for me. So now I opened up that sample album. I just made I'm going to click on This photo. I just added I'm going to go to info my Wi-Fi is very slow I'm out in the country now after the flooding of my home and we have a really slow Wi-Fi Okay, it automatically gave it a tag of sky and sunset. So even the automatic one man It does a really good job, but I could edit it and I could add a hashtag Where was I at St. Augustine or whatever so you get the idea so it's really really a neat way that you can organize your own photos have them at your fingertips across all of your devices and Be ready to paint at all times. That's the goal this painting stuff I'd rather be painting than doing all these things, but you do have to do the little tedious things, too. I Wanted to pop back in here before I ended the video to show you what the Picture looks like on your phone with the app. So when you are looking at one drive on your phone This is the section of the files and you know I rethought about using the files versus the photo category Because of the next image I'm going to show you here what you can do You can set your phone to automatically upload all of the images from your phone on to one drive Now you see I still have 2100 photos remaining to be uploaded It's probably going to fill up your one drive space. You may have to purchase the premium Version which I don't think is very expensive, but you can turn this feature off, too If you want to customize and upload what you want, but that's the reason that I think I'm going to start organizing my photos in The photo section versus the file section. So that's totally up to you but play around with it have fun with this and I think it's really going to help So anyway, I hope that helps you guys one drive is a great way to organize and Categorize and tag your photos so that you can have your own awesome reference images at your fingertips across all of your devices Hope that helped guys and as always happy happy happy painting. Bye