G'day All,


I do weekend sport photography for the local paper. I use a 50D with a Canon 70 - 200 L 2.8. My numbers of keepers have gone up a lot since moving to this lens. My problem now though is the sheer numbers of pics that I generate.


The sports editor wants to see all of my pics that I rate as a keeper. I may have only a few that really are good for the topic BUT she needs to see numbers on the backs for identification purposes I may need to give a dozen or 2 dozen for the one pic they wish to use. I don't know what the criteria is for each edition but I do have an idea of the overall needs of the editor. I routinely give them over every weekend shootingbetween 1000 - 1500 pics to them. Soccer, Aussie Rules, Hockey, Netball, all with different grades and ages as well asother sports thrown in occasionally to jumble it up.


When I download them I sort them in to topics and cull the bad ones immediately. After the sort into folder topics is done I then review each particular event. In bridge I rate them quickly and apply a 3 star rating to photos I think she would use in print. The other pictures are left as aids to ID the players.


When I give the sorted pics to her though, her paper uses xp asthe OS and only has basic software for the computers. As a result she manually reviews exah picture which is very time consuming. I would like to know if there is any FREE software that will pick up the rating I apply to the ones I nominate and display them. I could rename the file and make it obvious but then I run into the problem of the file losing its place in the sequence and thus making it hard to ID the players.


If they ran Win 7 then it wouldn't be a problem, but right now it's a lot of time being wasted and being on a tight deadline makes this a bottleneck I'd like to get rid of.





Cheers





John Murray