Having a digital camera at my disposal for the last 4 years, I can tell you: Photographs are a big load of data to manage. The trouble is not obvious from the beginning but after counting some GB’s of photos it really get hard to find photos. I used some photo management software before (mostly software that came with my camera) but I never got the feelling that the software was untieing my hands. Actually most software for managing photos is bloated with eye-candy and transitions effects that at the end of the day get in your way. I’m not going to mention here software that I rejected, as its pointless, but I will rather tell you about Picasa 2. The photo management and manipulation application from Google.
I must way I really like applications from Google. Just look at Google Talk… simple small and does the work! I love it. Picasa follows the same rule: Do the job! And it does…
When you first install, Picasa will search your harddrive for photos. You can not imagine how many photos can be lost in your harddrive! After that initial step the application is ready to run and any further photo indexing is done in the background.
What Picasa gave me:
- Get photos from your camera
- The ability to manage the awfull big photo collection
- The ability to quickly edit and retouch photos (including a very good red-eye reduction filter)
- Add tags to photos and use the photo’s path as tags
- Embed captions in the jpeg files
- Quicksearch the photos and see them filtered while typing
- Instantly send an e-mail with the photo having the photo automatically resised to reasonable for e-mail dimentions
- Create CDs with photos that can autoplay
- Create web pages with photos
- Correct lighting, red-eyes, etc from photos
What Picasa gives but I don’t need:
- Printing on the web
- Blogging
And all the above done with a lighting speed GUI, that is actually usefull…
All that for free from Google 🙂 I suggest you try it out…
