Has anyone used Picasa?
 

That's Google's free photo organizer. Opinions sought.

Picasa

I've never used it. I have a Mac, and use iPhoto.

HOWEVER, I did read a review of Picasa from Walter Mossberg, and he thought very highly of it.

Used very briefly only. Did not like it. Wish it had more options, but its free. Ended up with Photoshop elements instead.

Funny you should ask. As you know, I recently bought a new scanner with the goal of archiving all of my Family's old photos. I have now catalogued and digitized about 450 pictures. I wanted an easy way to organize and create slideshows of these pictures with a program that was free and easy to use. Then I discovered Picasa. It is a great program. Within 10 minutes, I had downloaded the program, and created a CD based slideshow. I plopped the CD into my home DVD player, and it worked perfectly. If you have a lot of images saved on your computer, this program is an awesome tool for organizing all of them. If you have more specific questions, please let me know. The program works great for me. I now plan to use it to make gift slideshow CD's for relatives that are customized to the viewer for Christmas gifts.

I give it :thumbup: :thumbup:

Hey Juan;

Do you have this? http://www.macilife.com/about/index.html.

Looks like a good deal on Amazon.

I use the free Adobe product... http://www.adobe.com/products/photos...m/starter.html

Yeah, looks good! And, no I don't have that book. I may have to consider buying it! Thanks for the tip! :thumbup:

Juan

I love picasa.
Even more so, if I didn't have Photoshop, Picasas I feel Lucky tool is absolutley amazing.

I've heard good things about Picasa. For slide shows you may want to check out Photostory 3. It's free too. Haven't used this one either but I've heard good things about it too.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...y/default.mspx

OR... you can always just get a Mac. Comes with iPhoto -- the world's best picture library, organizer, and (novice) editor in the world. :D

(yeah, I know... here I am pontificating again... sorry, I just can't help myself, I guess.)

Juan

Yeah but here's the thing.
I use my computer.. :D

iPhoto smart album
 

Hey Juan, have you tried out the iPhoto smart album option yet ?

No, I have not, but this is why. I have almost 1,600 pictures (1,598, to be exact), and they are all meticulously organized (by me). I do not allow iPhoto to simply import all my pictures. What I do is open them in photoshop, re-size them and tweak them, and save them onto my hard drive (with a file name I select, obviously), and THEN import them into iPhoto from there. I realize that I can let iPhoto do all the importing and saving, but I am anal about this stuff. So, anyway, when I import them, I immediately put them into their own album. Anyway, long answer, but I guess what I am trying to say is that I don't have a use for smart albums in iPhoto. Great feature, though! :thumbup:

Juan

i have over 10,000 pictures on my system, and use a fairly simple directory structure/naming convention. I don't get too hung up on catalogueing every picture and naming it something appropriate. So far I haven't had any problems retrieving any pics that i was looking for.

Many photographers use acdsee, you might want to check it out.

http://www.acdsystems.com/English/index.htm

And by the way, can we cool it with the mac vs. pc bullshit, if someone asks a question like "what should i get to do blah on my PC" or "has anyone had experience with yadda on a Mac" can we try to reply with PC based suggestions for the pc questions and mac suggestions for the mac questions? No one with a PC is going to drop money on a mac to fix a pc problem and vice versa, so let's try to help one another instead of continuing the H.S. "my shit is better than your shit" shit....

Just a suggestion btw.I'm just tired of hearing it all day at work (yeah, I've been in the IT field for almost 20 years), there's no reason to get religious about an Operating System and some silicone. (well, silicone if it's installed correctly in females can cause religious happenings, but that's another topic to be discuessed later).

And no offense meant to anyone in particular. :thumbup:

That looks like a neat program! And, wow, 10,000 pics?!? :wow:

Also, sorry if I un-intentionally hijacked your thread, Kevin. Did you end downloading Picasa, by the way?

Juan

I get some side jobs here and there for family, friends, and some publishing companies that i used to work for in NYC, Anaheim, and LA. Nothing major, I make no money at it and that's the way i want to keep it, the minute it becomes "work" is the day i'll sell my gear....

My apologies too for going off topic. Did'nt intend it to turn a Picasa question into an iPhoto discussion and any kinda mac vs pc nonesense but, errr, thats what happened.

Thanks for the advice and entertainment. "Tastes great/Less filling" debates are good for a laugh.

I haven't downloaded it yet. I think I'll give it a try. I have tried ACDSee and I was thinking of buying it. They had a special for $20 but I missed it. I mostly want to be able to have one program that will group rename and group resize. I hate having to do it one at a time. BTW, this is mostly for managing the pictures for FF. My library has gotten rather large no thanks to the demands of you animals. ;)