Continuing the technology series on how I get things done… For me, Google Picasa is the only way to go in terms of photo management. I’ve got about 22,000 photos right now and Picasa handles it all with style and ease.
1. You can organize through folders or albums or search via tags and descriptions. Photos are instantly discovered and added to picasa.
2. In the tray, you can do batch editing and incredibly easy photo touch ups. My wife couldn’t care less for this geeky computer stuff, but she loves the ability to easily manipulate an image through this (ie. red eye removal, cropping, soft-focus, etc.). You can also email, blog, geotag, or send these photos easily to an online web album as well.
3. You can easily scale the albums and photos to your liking. Scrolling through photos is incredibly slick. Pictures can also be integrated easily into a slideshow or a screensaver.
Picasaweb albums is really the online counterpart to Picasa’s desktop software. It doesn’t quite have the community that Flickr offers, but it’s simple and free. ie. Check out the album for my latest trip to Boston. I like how it doesn’t scale down photos to tiny grainy shots like many other free photo sharing sites do.
What’s also fantastic that I’ve recently discovered is that there are plugins that have been developed for it, so that you can upload directly to other photo communities like flickr and facebook!
Google has also recently added additional shared storage between picasa and gmail you can purchase for a decent price. But the free space will be plenty enough for me for quite a while.
Overall, definitely one of the best free desktop applications that have helped enhance my productivity, period.
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August 14, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Ken Levy
I was leaning the same way until a friend introduced me to Pixamo. It’s another free service that is great for organizing and presenting photos like Picasa, but the searching and browsing on Pixamo are better than on any other site I’ve visited. Pixamo tags are organized into four categories (people, places, events, and dates), and each tag represents a collection or album of related photos. One photo or video can be in many different albums (depending on the tags associated with it), and instead of setting viewing rights by album, you can make a single photo private, public, or accessible to different combinations of friends. There is also an import feature that will pull all of your Google photos, their tags, captions, and privacy settings into Pixamo for free.
August 16, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Lon
Hey Ken, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. I just started checking pixamo out… the thing with picasa is the desktop application… that’s where the highlight really is. picasa’s web albums are ‘okay’. it’s really about the integration.. and i actually like the fact that people don’t need to register or have all the right permissions to see photos with picasa…
i agree though pixamo looks much more advance when it comes to the online photo storage