Since purchasing a digital camera a few years ago, I have acquired a bit of my mother’s tendency to photograph everything…128 times. Looking through her photo albums now though, I am glad she did!
So far, Marie and my digital photo “library” consists of more thab 15,000 pictures and consume 29 GB of disk space. This has grown exponentially because I am also scanning all my mom’s old traditional pictures as well.
I have them all neatly organized in a folder structure like this: DATE-EVENT. So, for Christmas 2006, the photos are in a directory named 20061225-Christmas. This works great for organization on the actual hard drive, but the number of pictures has become daunting and it has become difficult to get a good view of what all we have and to decide what we want to actually print. We were in desperate need of a photo organizer.
Enter Picasa. My mother introduced me to Picasa. That’s right - my mom. Sure, I had seen it before now, but it never really interested me until I saw it in action. I recently moved her sizable digital photo collection to a new external hard drive. When I did that, I simply pointed Picasa to the new drive and within minutes, thousands of pictures were neatly displayed and categorized on screen. I was amazed at how well it worked.
It will also monitor directories for you, so new additions show up immediately. Photos can be published and shared via Picasa Web Albums. Picasa allows you to easily tag and organize photos into libraries. It also features basic image editing capabilities. I won’t use it for editing; Photoshop or Gimp have me covered there.
As with all Google products, Picasa is ridiculously easy to use. For image cataloging and organizing, it’s my application of choice. Oh, and you can’t beat the price at an affordable $0.
Available for Windows and Linux
Technorati Tags: digital pictures, Google, photos, picasa, pictures
10-4. I concur.
Philip
October 1st, 2007
Hey Philip,
I assume you are using the Linux version, right? Does it work well? I haven’t tried it yet. I am seriously in awe of the Windows version. It is a great little piece of software!
Zack
October 1st, 2007
Yes, Zack, I am using the Linux version. It is identical to the Windows version. Here is my problem with picture management. Picasa is not persistant. For instance, I have a file server where I host all of my media. When I work with Picasa on one machine, its changes are only persistant on that machine. Picasa creates a few files (probably XML in nature) that contain the changes made in Picasa, such as album groupings, to the local hard drive of the machine running Picasa. Therefore, when my wife goes in to the pictures folder from her machine, she does not see the changes I have made through Picasa. If she opens Picasa from her machine, it is like starting from scratch. I guess I could copy my config files to her machine, but that is rediculous.
I think what I need is a program on the file server that can be remotely accessed from the web that uses a PHP front-end and for the backend uses ImageMagik (for image manipulation), MySQL for album creating through tables and storage, and some sort of uploading application to upload the desired pictures to a hosting account with the required credentials. I may have to look into this and see if a project exists. If not, I may have to try to get this going. i just prefer to have all of my media on one central server for easy access from all machines. It also makes backup very easy. I just backup the desired picture folders or the whole drive on one server.
Philip
October 1st, 2007
Philip,
This applies to Windows - so it might be a bit different for you.
All of the actual photo changes should be stored in files within each photo’s directory. At least, that is how it is in Windows. Each directory has a picasa.ini file. I actually think this is neat, because the changes are not actually committed to the files themselves, but the changes are tracked via this file and Picasa reads that. You can export a physically-altered copy of course.
Anyways, that doesn’t help with albums, etc, which are stored locally in .pal files. These can be synchronized across machines in order to see the same albums, etc. It’s not ideal, but it works.
Again, this is all for the Windows version. I have not played with the Windows one. For a free application, Picasa is great. I doubt it was created/released with the power user who wants to share images/albums among multiple computers via a file share in mind.
Still, knowing Google, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them add such functionality.
Zack
October 2nd, 2007
I know that this article was to promote Picasa. I got off on a rant about what I wish it could do, but I want to be clear about the fact that I also love the capabilities this product has. I use it at home. And what you said above about the ini files is correct with the Linux version as well. Some files are stored in the directory with the pictures and some files are stored locally (when working with pictures on a remote drive).
However, for most home users with a single computer and a single compilation of pictures, this free product is more than worthy of your time. I am still amazed at the quality of the free products that Google is churning out (or buying up and releasing).
You can see the differences between Google’s purchases and Ebay’s purchases. Ebay had an article out today discussing the fact that Skype was a bad buy for them. Some people have it and some people don’t.
Philip
October 2nd, 2007