Wow, I had no idea that Picasa had come this far. Those were my first thoughts when I downloaded Picasa after reading a Google employee’s blog. I don’t recall which blog and am not ambitious enough to go hunt it down. But after spending 180 seconds with this software called Picasa, I am impressed. I paid good money for Lightroom 1.1. Upgraded for free to 1.3, then 1.4. Paid more money to get 2.0 which didn’t work well, so downloaded 2.1 RC and finally installed a stable 2.1 version. Lightroom is great but it had lots of growing pains…it took many, many dedicated hours of checking settings before I could finally get it to print correctly (and based on my notes, the only thing that changed was upgrading to 2.1…now my prints come out the correct color.) But now, Lightroom prints flawlessley and without any consternation. Makes me wonder why I had any trouble at all….
But lightroom doesn’t like video. So I have to figure out how to store those pesky videos that pop up on my little digital camera. Picasa has no qualms at all about video. It enjoys video, jpg, and photoshop psd formats with ease. It installed quickly on one machine, and is now tearning through all 50,000 images on the other machine.
And with all the duplicates that have grown and multiplied, Picasa has a function to look for those doubled up images. (I haven’t figured out what to do with the resulting screen, but then it has only been 4 minutes….)
More udpates later when I get under the hood and try to tweak it for me.
Popularity: 3%
Picasa is working very well for me. Especially since it handles video and photographs without complaint. However, it still does not hold a candle to Lightroom in terms of the entire editing, cropping, and adding various sorting schemes and catalogs.
I wish I could combine the best features of Lightroom with the best features of Picasa. Perhaps one or the other of these softwares will figure out the next best thing and do just that.
Dear GarykPatton (if that is your real name),
No real updates to speak of. Lightroom works like a champ. I use it everyday. Picasa is what I use when I need to dump a load of pictures onto the Picasa site so others can see the pictures. It is otherwise sitting dormant on my machine. There are just some things that i *cannot* do. And so, Lighroom and Photoshop CS4 remain the strong horses in my stable. Got real questions?…just ask…oh…no real questions…I figured as much.
But then, I appreciate all the comments you send Mr. GarykPatton. This alias and all the other aliases you use. You are almost as prolific in sending me comments as are my Russian Friends. Without you, it would just be a quiet and mostly ignored blog. So thanks. I appreciate your kind words and comments. Do enjoy visiting and hope your are having *fun* on the net. Please remember to be a good Netizen…
Your blogger,
D