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2015 Reverse Phone Lookup

A place for everything: How to manage your photos Managing your photos--a lot easier than you think. What a surprising number of people don't realize is that every device these days pops up as a drive on your system, and that you can drag and drop your files onto your computer--even your phone. (And to those of you saying "everybody knows that already!" trust me; they don't.)Commit to downloadingFirst, you have to make the decision--and stick to it--that you'll download (or upload) all your photos and videos within a day or so of taking them. It's a good idea to get in the habit of at least copying your photos and videos off your device and it really takes no time; once you've got a system in place, you can do it while watching TV, eating dinner, or playing with the cat. Why bother? The last thing you want to do is run out of space on your card at a key moment or lose your media if you misplace or break your device. If you want to keep it portable to share, that's fine. But you also want to be able to hit "delete" or "format" if necessary. And you need to commit to the plan. If you don't, you'll end up more confused, having to remember whether you downloaded something or not before you can start looking for it.Figure out your need to retrieveDon't just dump everything in your system's default folders (such as My Pictures), though they're fine to use as a root and might be easier to migrate if/when you switch machines. Figure out how you'll need to find them again, and how often. How do you remember? What's the first thing that comes to mind for you--where you shot something or when you shot it? Do you need different systems for different computers? While keywording and tagging are certainly best practices, they do add extra overhead to a process that you might not be able to maintain and you don't necessarily need to do it. And if you think you'll only need to find a given photo every now and then, you don't need to get very elaborate.I use Lightroom to manage my photos at home, but that's because I use it for raw image processing. But everything's also organized for easy retrievability using just Windows Explorer as well.Lori Grunin/CNETFor example, I (obviously) use the photos I shoot for work differently than than those I shoot on my own time--and because the two overlap, I end up with a lot in both locations, but I keep them organized differently. At work I put everything in folders by camera name; at home, by date and location of the shoot. For a coarse level of retrievability, if you just use a utility to rename all the files to something basic but meaningful, like "stair cats in Queens," (plus a file number increment, of course) you can search the file system. Then it's pretty easy to visually scan the thumbnails for the photo you want. If you'll need to find photos more frequently, then it pays to step up to a program that, say, lets you flag the photos you like; flagging quickly narrows down the results of your search when you're looking, but doesn't take a lot of time up front (especially if you use software that lets you quickly scan and flag). Get a card reader if necessaryFor cameras and camcorders, it really pays to buy a card reader if you don't have the necessary media slot in your system, though most recent computers have at least an SD card slot. While you can connect the devices directly to your computer, standalone drives or slots tend to be a bit faster, and the goal of this exercise is to make downloading as painless as possible so that you'll actually do it regularly. Phones, on the other hand, tend to have inconveniently located spots for their flash media, and use tiny, easy-to-lose microSD cards. You're better off leaving those in the device. Tablets fall somewhere between, some with only built-in memory, some with easily accessible SD slots. As a corollary to this, I also suggest you get a second card for your camera or camcorder if you don't have one already. They're pretty cheap, and, frankly, once you start downloading regularly you're bound to forget that you left the card in the reader regularly as well. Always keep at least one extra card in your camera or bag.Which software?Choosing the right software for importing and managing your files is several stories on its own. There are tons of choices--free, cheap, or expensive, with variations in how many features they offer from the ultrabasic to the nuclear option. Though basic downloading and drag and drop are available within the operating system, a utility that lets you batch rename is a helpful complement (I use FastStone Photo Resizer for batch renaming). If you use some sort of cloud-based syncing, such as iCloud Photo Stream or the Eye-Fi system, to automatically distribute your photos from the device to a home hard drive or an online sharing service, definitely make it a habit to rename and move the photos on a regular basis. Services like that tend to organize everything by date, either by default or as the only option. That makes sense, because the date is the only piece of information that software can guarantee it will find. Personally, I'm not comfortable with using an online service as my only photo storage option. I use an online photo-sharing service as "backup" for a subset of my photos. The rest live on my computer and various hard drives. But keeping at least part of them online makes them retrievable from anywhere. Bottom line: You don't need to spend a lot of money on software or a lot of time tagging and keywording. If you simply make sure you download photos and videos religously, and at the very least rename them to something useful, you'll significantly increase how findable they are.A primer on online reputation management Are you really who Google says you are?Go ahead, check the first 10 listings that come up on a Google search for your name. Depending on how common a name you have, the results are likely to produce links to your Facebook profile, or a LinkedIn resume, or that time in high school you scored eight points against a bitter rival. But chances are you might also see something on that first page that's either embarrassing, silly, or just plain wrong.If the prospect of a future employer, customer, or romantic interest seeing that link raises your blood pressure, you can turn to several reputation management firms in hopes of getting more control over your presence in search results. This is without question a murky field: for every person who has moved on after an honest mistake there are others trying to cover up shady behavior or hide the truth.But reputation management consultants believe that people have the right to control how their name is presented to the world. Google may be the de facto public record of our times, but it's never going to tell you how it decided that those 10 links were the most relevant details of your life."Google is not God, it is not the First Amendment, and it's not the truth," said Michael Fertik, founder of Reputation.com. "It's probably the best machine of the last 10 years, but it's just a machine."How it worksOnline reputation management is a cross between a number of different fields, including forensic analysis, search-engine optimization, and legal maneuvering, said Michael Roberts, a senior consultant for Rexxfield. Many firms are hired at the request of those who believe they have been libeled on Web sites, and firms such as Rexxfield can work on their client's behalf to get that content removed from a particular site through take-down notices and other conventional legal means.Michael Roberts, senior consultant at Rexxfield.RexxfieldHowever, this isn't always an easy thing to do, as anonymous accounts are often used and damaging content can be removed from one site before the legal process gets rolling and moved to another site, Roberts said. That means Rexxfield and other reputation management firms often resort to side projects aimed at finding a way to get more content into Google's database linked to that person's name.There are many ways to go about this, some more ethical than others. For example, several consultants interviewed for this story didn't think there was anything wrong with convincing clients to join social-networking services under their names, start a personal blog or Twitter feed, or create a home page on a domain with their name. Links to prominent services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Flickr carry a lot of weight with Google, and can push unwanted content to the Google Ghetto, otherwise known as page two.But there are plenty of companies willing to play on the darker side of this game. Fertik said a common technique is to try and sneak a client's name into a site with a lot of rank with Google, such as IMDB.com. There are apparently a lot of "co-producers" on small films in IMDB that didn't necessarily contribute much to the product, he said.If your name is relatively common, some will create fake blogs purporting to be other people who share your name, which won't boost your own presence but will create enough new content under searches for that name as to push the undesirable results farther out on Google. And the bottom feeders of the business are not above spam-bots and even distributed denial-of-service attacks to force sites with damaging content off the Web entirely.Then there are the tactics in the middle, which are relatively widespread but few are willing to admit they employ. This includes things like "astroturfing," or the creation of anonymous commenter accounts to buttress a positive piece of content or lash out against a negative one. The rise of content farms like Yahoo's Associated Content or Demand Media also allows firms to write articles for those services using a client's byline, which can simply be explained away as a way to earn a little cash on the side.Several consultants interviewed said they had clear procedures regarding the types of cases they wouldn't accept, such as those involving crimes against a child or extremely serious violent crimes. For less serious but still weighty matters, Roberts noted that "if somebody has turned their life around, we're willing to help."What would Google do?Google declined provide access to any employees to discuss the subject of reputation management but sent over this statement: Our goal is to help people find relevant information. So, we don't condone reputation management campaigns that attempt to hide relevant information. While there is nothing in our guidelines that explicitly forbids reputation management, if we uncover link schemes or other violations, we reserve the right to take action in response. We are constantly working to improve our algorithms to ensure people find the most relevant information possible for their searches.Rexxfield and Google have had interactions, but mostly in the legal sense regarding things like take-down notices, Roberts said. Talking with the search people about specific results would be a waste of time, he said: "We don't bother because they won't do it."Reputation.com founder and CEO Michael FertikMichaelfertik.comFertik said Google is definitely aware of the services that his company provides but declined to get into details on specific conversations that may or may not have taken place."The work done by consultants in this field requires them to study Google's ranking results very closely, and over time Reputation.com has identified "hundreds" of ways to influence Google's rankings, Fertik said. However, many of those are only applicable in very specific cases, or for short periods of time, or too much trouble to be really worth the effort, he said.Still, Reputation.com says it has identified "a few gems" for getting things done in Google that it naturally declines to disclose. "What we have to do is spend as much time in useful observation as possible, and hope and verify that our beliefs are right," Fertik said.Revenue from reputation?Fertik's company is one of the larger ones in the reputation management field and has been around since 2006, when it was founded as Reputation Defender (the company changed its name last week). It has received funding from Kleiner Perkins and Bessemer Partners, among others, and currently has110 employees based in Redwood City, Calif.Reputation.com has three levels of products, ranging from around $5 a month to more detailed services for business customers that can cost as much as $10,000 a year. Rexxfield, a much smaller outfit that is about to expand according to Roberts, doesn't publish its price list, preferring to work out pricing with individual clients.The field is quickly evolving from those who sought reputation management services to hide things to those who are looking to put their best foot forward on the Web. "People put thought in the way they dress beforethey go on a date or before a job interview," Fertik said, and as the Web becomes an even bigger part of our lives, it's natural that people will want to make themselves look as good as possible, he said.This will definitely continue to be a balancing act between those who want to be seen as the arbiters of what is relevant on the Web and those who want greater control of how their identity is presented to the world: for both good reasons and bad.But not everyone who wants to change the way they look on Google is trying to game the system, according to Fertik."I think there's a flaw in the thinking that anything that is a change of Google is manipulation," he said. "Google's statement reflects their wish that we believe that they are God."