Picasa — Free Image Organization from Google
I’d heard of Picasa before, but never played with it. I’d even downloaded it when Google announced it, but never installed it. Last night, after an e-mail conversation with Rob about how poor some of the other solutions I’d tried are, I decided to give Picasa a try. I downloaded the newest version, and ran the install. Once the install was complete, I asked the software to find all my images.
I could tell from the start that this was going to be a bit better than most of the programs I’ve tried thus far. For one thing, it’s fast. I was able to browse images during the import, with very little performance degradation.
Some nice things about Picasa:
- It’s free
- It can work with certain RAW files
- It can work with Photoshop files
- It’s fast
- It can make fairly nice index prints/contact sheets
- Image “package” printing
- Files added to folders already indexed are added to the database automatically
- Basic image editing and correction included
- E-mail, web and CD-ROM image delivery options
- Image backup feature
I haven’t found anything I’m not enthused about yet. Did I mention it’s a free download?
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One of the way-cool things I like is that you can flag specific directories to be watched for updates. One thing that I have noticed, though, is that PSD files in modes other than RGB are not recognized.
The combination of Picasa and CS2 just… well… works. If you open a raw format file in Picasa (right click, Open File), it’ll load into Camera Raw in CS2 automagically. I can dump, Picasa will auto-index, I do my first cut, select all and open from Picasa to Camera Raw, set the profiles on the first frame and sync the rest, and then drop all of them into the CS2 workspace. Of course, having a gig of RAM helps make that easier…
Mmm…hadn’t noticed that non RGB PSDs aren’t recognized, I guess because I tend to think in RGB for images. I do my CMYK conversions elsewhere (Corel Draw).
Of course, I don’t have CS2, or even CS. Just lowly Photoshop 7. So, I don’t know if the integration is going to be as tight. But, even with only a half gig of RAM, it’s zippy, even with a couple of images up in Photoshop, and with Firefox and Thunderbird hanging out in the background.
Of course, now that all the images are in, I have to set about the task of organizing things….