Using a computer to organize digital photographs

A facial plastic surgeon's photographic files are a potential storehouse of learning material. Manual review of before-and-after photographs is time consuming and self-limiting. Computers can facilitate the analysis, storage, and review of photographs and thereby serve as an aid to learning from the results of our surgery. This article describes a personal approach to automating this process. The surgeon classifies the photographs, and the office staff performs the typing and filing. As the speed and resources of computers rapidly expand, this process will become faster, simpler, and more popular.