Have an organized hierarchy of folders just for your photos. You will have to decide where you want them and make the folders.

When you plug in your camera, I have to use a card reader, but many models that isn't needed, your computer will ding when it has recognized the camera as new hardware.

Go to Windows Explorer (obviously if you are on another platform this won't work), and navigate to the new drive assigned to your camera, it will be under all your C:\ files somewhere showing as F, G, depending on what else is on your system. They may be in a series of folders on in just one folder, depends on the flash card. It might be a folder called DCIM, then when you open that or click on the plus beside it, it shows something about your camera name.

Open the camera folder(s) (one at a time if there are more than one), and you should see thumbnails of your photos start to be generated. When all the thumbnails show, do an edit>select all. Then do an edit>copy to folder and navigate to the folder you want to put them in. Then click ok or some prompt. Windows will show your photos being copied unless there are just a few in which case it will go very fast.

If you don't want to copy all the photos, select individual ones by holding down the ctrl key after highlighting the first one and select those you want. Don't let up the ctrl key until you've selected all the photos you want. If you want a block of files but not all of them in the folder, highlight the first one you want, hold down the shift key and highlight the last one. That will select every photo in that series. Copy to the folder you want as before.

If you want all but the first several or so, highlight all of them, then do an edit>inverse selection and it will automatically select all the ones you didn't highlight. These are just little tricks to make things speedier once you get used to it.

That's all there is to it. It gets to be second nature.

Be sure to back up all your photos at least one place, preferably two, like an external portable hard drive, dvd, cd or something, and don't alter the originals in any way. If you edit them in Photoshop, save them in a new folder. It's good to open your photo, duplicate it, close the original. That way you can't accidentally overwrite your original unless you try very hard. The copy gives it the same name with copy # added. I have a Work File for each month where I keep photos I've worked on in Photoshop, sometimes a subfolder for a special event.

Maybe Picasa requires you to use your desktop which is clumsy and dumbed-down way to archive your photos imo.

You can email pictures directly from picasa, just go to the bottom and click email, after you've put the pictures you want on "Hold". try it.

Thanks, I will try all of the above. I actually can email from Picassa and I do email to myself but it is a picture folder system that I will work on. I knew there had to be easier ways than all the steps I do just to get a picture moved around. Pat

I forgot to mention that after the computer recognizes your camera as new hardware, sometimes it takes a bit to show up, windows will show a popup-type window "what do you want to do" and give you some choices.

I always cancel that and go the way I mentioned above because one of the options messes up my photo numbers. I want the contiguous ones assigned by the camera, not Pic 1, Pic 2, etc.

There are filing/archiving systems you can download. I made up my own which works for me. A screen capture is tacked on an old thread within the last couple months or so.

In the end, you should do what works best for you, but if you want to really get on top of it, you need to learn some basic skills where you will have more control. With me, it's about what is controlling where my photos will go and how they are going to look. I don't want them on my desktop for sure. Maybe they are shortcuts, I don't know how that works,

People have said good things about how you can get good results with Picasa for post processing your photos, but from what I've seen and heard about their system, I'm not impressed. A girl who doesn't know any better sends me photos from the Picasa site, and Picasa seems to automatically resize the photos and degrades the quality. Of course, you can email more simply with Picasa's system, but what quality are the photos you are emailing?

You will have much better control over the quality of your photos if you use Photoshop (if you have it, think you said you did) and learn a few basic skills with it such as cropping, levels, unsharp mask, and simple color correcting. You can resize or crop them any size you want for emailing by learning to use the crop tool and saving in a folder separate from your originals. Then email out of that folder. Usually for emailing or posting here, I like to crop 800X600 and try to keep the save quality at 150kb or less and sometimes size 640X480. Save for web is good, but it strips off my exif data which I like to retain now. To keep that, I do a "save as"

For your real estate work, you want the best quality photos you can manage in the long run. Photoshop and larger files, properly post-processed for brochures, printed media is the way to go for that and also for websites showcasing homes, etc.

Yes, it takes some effort and time to learn, but is well worth it in the long run and will give you a competitive edge, you will be happier with your output, and have much more control.