Back in the old days, things were very simple. We had a camera. We
took photographs. We sent the prints away to BonusPrint. We discarded
mistakes. We filed the photos in albums. We ordered duplicates for
grandparents. Best of all, my involvement in the whole process was
negligible.
Then some idiot invented the digital camera. We still took photos but
the whole issue of printing became more complicated. You could be
adventurous and attempt to print on your inkjet printer at home. This
would result in ludicrously sized and distorted A4 images, drenched in
ink, that gave small children nightmares.
Alternatively, you could hoard all your photos on your PC and proudly
drag dinner guests and relatives into your study to hunch over your
computer for 3 hours to admire your holiday snaps from Corfu. You
would forget to serve dinner (which was burnt in any case) or get
drinks for anyone.
Any request from Grandma for an actual glossy print would be
dismissively rejected with 'Oh no. What do you need that for ? It's so
much easier to look at them on my PC.' Easier for you maybe but not
for Grandma, particularly as she didn't have a PC.
Your marriage almost ends when the PC suffers a fatal hard disk drive
error. Losing your CV is one thing but 1,387 photographs of the family
is quite another. Telling the wife, you didn't burn a DVD containing
all the photos is not a pleasant experience. Particularly as she
repeatedly asked you to do so and, worse, you repeatedly assured her
it was in hand. You are forced to get a job in technical consulting
which means you travel a lot until she cools down. Three years and
counting...
Then some idiot invented image editing software. This meant that every
single digital image was now subject to a time-consuming, rigorous and
thorough review by the 'Photographic approval and refinement
committee' (my wife is CEO). Each photo is now subject to prolonged
and detailed scrutiny. Every human effort is made to improve the end
product. Like a surgeon, you will try to remove redeye, crop, sharpen,
brighten and resize in an effort to salvage an image that previously
would have been discarded instantly.
Digital cameras came bundled with cut down trial versions of expensive
photo editing software packages. Typically, this software was bloated,
slow, difficult to use for novices and horrendously complicated.
After an unfortunate experience with Ulead Photo
Express and a short stay in The
Priory, my counsellor suggested using Kodak
EasyShare.
This software was still slow and bloated but free. Eventually, I was
able to modify images, save images and burn a CD. Then I would simply
take the CD to BonusPrint and normal service was resumed.
I didn't use the 'Albums' in EasyShare. I simply stored all the photos
in my own folders. A folder for each year. A sub-folder for each
event. Because the left side of my tiny brain still thinks in
hierarchies not tags.
I would download all photos from the camera into 'Staging' for
approval by the committee. Then I would create another directory
'ForPrinting', burn the CD and forget the whole nightmare for another
3 months.
However, after a recent PC rebuild and watching the gigabytes of
EasyShare software downloading and installing for 35 minutes, I
finally capitulated. I decided to try
Picasa out. Picasa was installed and
running very quickly. Picasa scanned my folders and indexed all my
photos - fast. As a bonus, Picasa fixed one of my biggest problems by
identifying and skipping duplicate photos.
The Picasa software was fast and intuitive (like most Google
products). There was a minimal feel to the interface which meant I
could actually understand it. Some other photo software packages are
so cluttered with menus, views and tabs, there is no room to actually
display the photo. Also, Picasa has a useful 'Undo' operation for
every change.
Picasa keeps a copy of the original image and maintains additional
versions for any modified photos. Hence, it was not easy to make
changes and simply overwrite the original image as I used to.
Now I can actually manage (search, delete, fix) my photos more easily.
Some of the early photos have lost the original date and time thanks
to other nameless software packages. Oddly, Picasa doesn't support
modifying EXIF data directly so I used the 30 day trial of
ACDSee (great name, eh ?) to update the
timestamps in batch.
It's early days yet but Picasa looks promising. It has all the
standard image editing features, email and blog capability, printing
support, incremental backup, integration with 'BonusPrint' for glossy
prints, a 'Create Gift CD' just for Grandma (who now owns a PC).
There are also some additional, esoteric features in Picasa
2.5
(Geotag, FTP publishing, integration with Google Video) and the
inevitable shared Web albums.
PS. Just noticed that while Picasa can add a 'Caption' to a photo,
there is no tagging (like Flickr). This is one area where the right
side of my tiny brain definitely wants tags. A single photo could be
tagged with the names of the people, the location, 'Holiday' etc etc.