This post is a break from my regular method of publishing images. I would like to take the time to review Picasa, the photo manager and editor from Google, which is included as part of the Google Pack.
I have been using Picasa to manage my pictures for over a year now, and have found it very satisfactory. Importing photos is a breeze - all you have to do is plug in your camera, select "Import", and click "Import All" after selecting your device. Once photos are imported, Picasa indexes all the photos in the folders you select on the computer, and lets you view them as a timeline, slideshow, or list view.
Search facilities are excellent, providing you add keywords to your images. With my collection of over 3000 photos a search takes less than a second!
For each photo, there are basic editing tools, with a useful backup of the original photo in case you wish to restore the changes you made.
There are also lot's of extras, including support for geo-tagging, and uploading photos to a free 1GB Picasa Web Album!
Overall, I would recommend Picasa to anybody with more than about 10 photos to manage. It is an excellent tool, and used properly can keep a reasonable sized image collection under control.
That sounds interesting as I'm in the throes of evaluating about 3 tools at once for managing my 16,000+ images! :-) I'm looking at IMatch, IView Media Pro, and Lightroom.
ReplyDeleteI'm leaning towards Lightroom because of the one-stop shopping features of it; however, I really like IMatch even though it doesn't have keywords. They have this thing called dynamic categories. Nice, but there is something that I like about keywords. If I could get over that, I'd probably really like it! :-)
Oh well, I've only 5 days remaining on my Lightroom evaluation and then I have to decide if I want to fork over $200.00!
Lightroom is certainly good if you're willing to pay the money. One of the best things about Picasa is the value it gives you for free.
ReplyDeletePicasa can basically organise your photos in two ways: by keywords, in which case you search for the sort of image you want to find; and also by "Albums", which are basically the same as categories in IMatch. As you browse through the "Timeline" view of images, you can select to add 1 or more images to a specific album. The image remains in the folder it is in, but when you click on the Album you added it to, it appears on the screen along with all the other photos in that album.
You can use both methods at once, so you might want to sort your images into albums and then go through and label them with keywords later.
Anyway, there's nothing to lose by testing Picasa. It's free, and available in the Google Pack. If you do decide to use it, I would like to know how your experience turns out.
I use Irfanview for everyday viewing and chores. I keep Picasa around becusesometimes the 'quick fixes' do wonders with phtos that just need a bit of tweaking.
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