Recently I decided to stop putting off the innevitable migration from analog to digital. I still have dozens upon dozens of photographs from the last 20 years or so that I had access to my own camera. Some of this is spurned by the need to post embarrassing pictures of all my friends on facebook in vengeance for posting my ugly mug up for the world to see. Some of my photos are neatly fitted into photo albums so I have decided to tackle these last. I have plenty that are loose and need to be better cared for. My wife has even more but I’ll let her play with those herself. On my mac I have iPhoto which is a great little piece of software but of course not available in the windows flavor, to this end I downloaded the latest version of Picassa. I’ll use freeware or open source products whenever possible, and I was overjoyed with the simplicity of Picassa. Granted I have some tweaking to learn but I was pleased by how much Google has take n the cue from Apple on their photo managing software.
Two things in particular I wish to point out. The first is the import feature which is incedibly robust, it recognized every device I threw at itmost importantly a TWAIN aquire from my scanner. This feature made it an absolute breeze to batch scan my pictures and then group and arrange them during the import process. The second feature I really love is not even directly in the package but rather a light weight viewer. I noticed the function during the install but paid little attention figuring I’d play with it later. After my first of many scanning sessions I double clicked an image file on my desktop and poof it appeared in a semi transparent window that overlaid the desktop with a cover flow type slider at the bottom displaying thumbnails of other images on the desktop. You can move and zoom the image at will and I didn’t notice any stuttering or refreshing I have become used to in other image viewers. If you’re looking for a nice piece of software to help manage your digital photo collection, I don’t think it’s necessary to look beyond Picassa. With it’s automatic sychronization with Picassa web albums it’s a snap to share selected pictures online. I even found a plugin that would allow me to upload pictures directly to facebook. I look forward to using Picassa more and seeing what other nifty things I have yet to discover.
