I installed Picasa on my laptop to have another look. Sam was interested in having it on her new computer. I wrote her an email about some of the reasons I hate Picasa and why she shouldn’t use it. It was quickly turning into an encyclopedia and I knew her brain would fuzz over if she had to read the whole thing. …[continued]
Picasa
Due to the fact that I’ve written several times about Picasa, I have people coming to JLog everyday as a result of their queries on the search engines. Here’s a sampling of searches from the past couple of days:
picasa db3
picasa show all geotags on map
picasa “unknown person” copy contacts
db3 picasa
picasa2\db3 Picasa2\contacts
picasa copy geotag from one picture
.pal picasa
does-google-picasa-store-metadata-in-the-pictures
unknown person picasa
picasa tags iptc …[continued]
I hope everyone survived Christmas in good shape. I usually do because the closest I ever come to eating sugar is steamed carrots. At my age, even a thin slice of fruit-cake could kill me. …[continued]
Another caveat for all you Picasa lovers. If you have keywords embedded in photos outside Picasa do not expect Picasa to know that unless they’re jpg’s.
You can double your work by adding tags (keywords) to your tiff’s in Picasa too. It’s a fun thing to do because Picasa will then allow you to search them. But, unless you are 100% done with your ‘real’ photo work and have time to add this as icing to your cake, I would discourage you from wasting your time on it. …[continued]
Awhile ago I recommended Picasa 3 to you. It’s fun and interesting and all that but there’s a little problem with backups. Picasa does offer the option of backing up your entire photo collection but it’s labour-intensive, inefficient and redundant. If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you should already be keeping at least one up-to-date backup of your entire photo collection. The issue here is backing up the work you do in Picasa. …[continued]
If you haven’t discovered Picasa 3.5 yet, you really should. It’s a riot. They’ve added face-tagging and a geo-tagging panel. No-one does geo-tagging as well as Google so that’s a no-brainer. As far as the name tags go, I spent many months IPTC-ing 10,000 photographs in great detail and I was not keen to start over with something that’s not in the same league. But, as ever, Google has made this different enough and fun enough to be worthwhile in its own right and it’s not difficult.
First, prime the system by tagging a couple of dozen people and then just let it go. It will continue churning out thumbnails of faces and try to match them up with the faces you’ve already tagged. The accuracy rate is phenomenal. It’s having a problem with my identical twin sisters, (so do I) but other than that it’s stunning. Then you can do things like make collages or movies or desktop backgrounds.
If you want to go really wild, you can also add geo-tags with their new full-length geo-tagging panel and follow the life of your photos on Google Earth. It’s all integrated with Picasa Web Albums as well.
When you first install Picasa, it takes you to their blog where there’s an introductory video about what’s new.
‘Nuff said; just go there.
2010 update – but here are some caveats:
Picasa Backup
Picasa Tags
IPTC: Picasa
Picasa Summary
Picasa 3 has been out for awhile and has lots of fun new features. Today, I’ll look at geotagging.
IPTC is a standard for embedding metadata in photographs. This is a summary of what is and isn’t IPTC-compatible software.
…[continued]
Email from a reader:
I have studied all your postings on digital photo organization. I am at a brick wall and I need some help.
I have been using Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0. I like the way it functions. However, for some reason, it keeps crashing on my computer. I believe this is because the program was written such a long time ago that XP is having difficulty with it.
If my computer was an ocean I could accurately say I am swimming in photographs.
If you are still using Windows Explorer as a photo viewer, there are better ways.
