Picasa

[Ent]

Hi

Been hunting through the site but can not find any ongoing threads or discussions on Picasa so thought might as well start one.

Found that I had many thousands of images from various cameras that lucky for me Canon Zoombrowser had put into date directories. I shoot a mixture of JPG and RAW with now a few movie ones. The big issue for me was that they sat on my laptop and were hardly ever seen. At Christmas a sister-in-law mentioned that I took a lot of pictures with a collection of cameras but she never got to see them. Ok, lets burn them to a DVD was my first thought until I came across a Kodak 8" digital frame that claimed to hold 16,000 imagines and display in 800x600 format. Nice piece of kit and the future of displaying pictures in the home.

The challenge was then to find and then catalogue the images. A quick surf of the web indicated that Picasa might be the tool. Well, it is not a bad tool with the following headline things.

1. Finds pictures any where on your laptop and then the unwanted directories can be shut down.

2. Limited but useful photo editing tools such as rotate, fill light, and crop that does not compromise the original image nor fill your computer with near duplicate images.

3. Face recognition. Brilliant, as this will pick up a lot of people in photographs automatically thus making for easy selection of a person.

4. Ability to create albums so in conjunction with face recognition you can put family group photographs together to send them a populated digital frame for a present. Yeap, Christmas and birthday presents will be solved for at least a period of time

5. Limited support for RAW imagines which is handy.

6. Web upload features which is handy for sharing photographs but limited at 1 GB of space.

The software is far from perfect and took a long battle to transfer information from an old laptop to a new one but in general a very useful tool to catalogue a mass of photographs, clean them up a bit, and burn DVD's for uploading to digital frames.

Total cost, just many sleep deprived nights

Cheers

[baycruisers]

For a free tool (and for uploading to Picasa web albums) Picasa is a pretty good piece of software. I use it on my netbook on the road to download and organize images from my SD card and upload them to my Picasa album for safekeeping and posting. You can purchase more storage from Google for not much money.

If you want to move up to something with more power consider ACDSee Pro or Lightroom 3 (at considerably more expense!)

[Ent]

There might be a few things out there but Picasa is not to bad once you get the hang of things such as transferring everything to a new system. Does have a neat presentation function for creating CD/DVD that enables you to produce a CD/DVD that can play straight once plug in.

Actually been searching the web for freeware applications as the Photoshop group are extremely expensive in Australia. Pretty happy with Picasa as the photo organisation tool of choice. The only real issue for me now is the lack of RAW image support for the Panasonic LX5. The long search has started on that issue.

Cheers Brett.

[Cow_king]

My biggest issue with picasa was every time i loaded it up it seemed to be scanning for more images and just seemed to never stop.

For my library management i rely on a combination of well organized folders and lightroom

[troutwhisperer]

I did not look to refresh how to do this but I believe there is a "switch" in the PIcasa set up so that Picasa will only look for pictures when it is started. Also you you can limit where Picasa looks so that the program only looks on those drives and those folders.

[karma]

Originally Posted by Ent

The only real issue for me now is the lack of RAW image support for the Panasonic LX5. The long search has started on that issue.

Cheers Brett.

Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying Picasa does not 'see' the RAW files from the LX5?

[Ent]

Originally Posted by karma

Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying Picasa does not 'see' the RAW files from the LX5?

That is correct. Panasonic changed the raw format slightly so you get a strong magenta caste and other corruption.

Cheers

[Ent]

Originally Posted by Cow_king

My biggest issue with picasa was every time i loaded it up it seemed to be scanning for more images and just seemed to never stop.

For my library management i rely on a combination of well organized folders and lightroom

You can set what folders to check always, only once and never.

Cheers

[faeriegodess612]

I've used Picasa for a long time now, and agree with you. I do most of my PP work with it, then if I want to do something more complicated, I use Gimp. Gimp is a free download too. Picasa as far as I know, if you upload a RAW file, and edit it, even something as simple as putting a watermark on it, then save, it'll auto save in jpeg.

Don't quote me on that, but I think thats how it works, because it'll add a jpeg tag at the end of the file name. Like for me, it might be DSC-0123.NEF.jpeg

[karma]

Originally Posted by Ent

That is correct. Panasonic changed the raw format slightly so you get a strong magenta caste and other corruption.

Cheers

Wow, I just got my LX5 from UPS yesterday and you are right....magenta pictures! What gives? Is Picasa aware of this? Does anyone know if there is an update from Picasa to correct this?