Are you a fan of Digital Media?  Do you have your memories stored in digital photos, digital video, or even digital audio formats?  The following is a collection of must-have software.  Think of it as your Digital Memories Toolkit.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

I am a huge fan of Windows Live Photo Gallery, primarily because of its simplicity and tagging functionality.  WLPG is not the first photo organizer to offer tagging, but what I really like about it is the ability to tag photos by tagging the files themselves.  It makes moving the tags as simple as sending the file.  That is a huge benefit for me.

Cost: FREE

Features: Tagging, Photo Editing (Cropping, Red Eye Reduction, Rotation, etc), Searching, Uploading (Live Spaces, Flickr)

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Picasa

Picasa is Google's Digital Photo organizer.  It is very powerful, search is extremely mature (big surprise), it has featrues such as facial recognition and tagging.  It is a close second to Windows Live Photo Gallery for me, and the #1 for many others.  Well worth looking at.  The biggest drawback for me is the tagging is help in a local database file so if you send the photo to someone, the photo will lose its tags.

Cost: FREE

Features: Tagging, Photo Editing (Cropping, Red Eye Reduction, Rotation, etc), Searching, Uploading (Live Spaces, Flickr), facial recognition

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Windows Home Server

This recommendation is the easiest one in the Toolkit.  I have tried many backup solutions such as WD's one-touch, Symantec Ghost, etc.  By far, Windows Home Server is the best backup solution.  And it isn't as expensive as one might think.  Backups are so simple.  After you install the client software (on up to 10 machines), you never have to think about it again.  It will back up each machine daily and notify you only when there are problems.  It is transparent, and perfect.

Cost: $499 for 500GB HP MediaSmart Home Server, $639 for 1TB Home Server

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Windows Movie Maker

The most popular free movie editing software used on the internet is Windows Movie Maker.  YouTube is full of videos created using this popular tool.

It has matured over the years, from the original version that shipped with Windows XP to the current version, that ships only with Windows Live.

The most advanced version, feature-for-feature is Windows Movie Maker 2.6 for Vista.  However, it has been said that all future versions of Windows will require a separate download of Windows Movie Maker through the Windows Live initiative.  The Windows Live Movie Maker product is still maturing, though it is showing promise.

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Paint.NET

This is one of the most difficult categories to give a drecommendation.  I would say that without question, Adobe Photoshop would be the clear winner, but it is not in the price range of many users.  Some just need to use a subset of Photoshop's features, and need it to be free.  That's where the recommendation for Paint.NET comes in.

Paint.NET is a free program that probably started out as a "Windows Paint on Steroids" but has quickly become Photoshop-like in some of its abilities (layers, filters, etc).

It is lightweight and fast.  Those who are used to Photoshop like me will be annoyed a bit by the hotkey combinations that don't reflect the ones in Photoshop, however, once you can force your brain to realize you are in Paint.NET and not another product, you can quickly get things done.

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Media Converter

I wish I had found this a long time ago.  If you try searching for any phrase like "3gp to wmv" on google, you'll find tons and tons of sites all trying to give you a converter that either has adware / spyware / or costs more money than it is worth.

The folks who made Media Converter did it right.  First, they offer two options for converting.  1) on the web and 2) conversion via software download.

I tried option 1 the first time.  I had a 3gp file on my Windows Mobile phone.  I needed it in .wmv.  The web conversion worked great.  I was so happy and impressed that I immediately donated money via paypal.  Then I discovered that you can download the conversion software.  Even better.  I highly recommend this software.  It has helped me so much and it is small and lightweight, and just works.

Media Converter will convert the following formats: 3g2, 3gp, avi, flv, m4v, mkv, mov, mp4, mpg, psp, wmv, mp3, wav, ogg, pdf, doc, xls, ods, ppt, odt

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