So, What is Picasa?
First of all, these days, if you’re still managing your digital photos by way of tedious and endless trees of directories, shame on you. Besides quickly becoming unmanageable for thousands of photos, there’s too many good tools out there that make viewing, managing, and even minor editing of your photo collections easy, intuitive, and even – ahem – fun. I guess.
All you Mac users should already know better. There’s a little program that came with your computer called “iPhoto”. Use it! Now! (No, wait. Finish the post, first.)
One tool I used to use while I was still an unenlightened Windows user was a program called “Picasa” – which, since it showed a lot of potential and usability, was immediately bought by Google. Picasa is basically the Windows version of iPhoto. Once installed on your machine, it scans your hard drives for all of your photos and videos, and creates a library of them within Picasa. Once you have your library initially imported, your life will already be ten times easier than before, because now, all of your photos are presented to you in an easy-scrolling, see-it-all-at-once sort of flow. On the left side will be a list of all the folders on your hard drive, which you can click on for quick access.
The best feature of Picasa that, when I first began using it, had me dancing, singing, and rolling on the floor in silly giggles, is the ability to create albums, and assign your pictures to them. These albums are independent of the folders and files, thereby freeing you from the tyranny of the folder tree!
Get it? This means that if you have taken scores of pictures of sea gulls in flight over the years, and have them spread out over multiple folders, you can now select them all in Picasa, and assign them to one album. Now, you can see hundreds of the little feathery creatures at once, without having to find them all in your extensive pile of directories.
Anyway, I really don’t want to get too involved in describing Picasa. I had to say something about it, though, because the main point of the post is built on it.
Try Picasa out when you get a chance. It good. You like. Download here. (This will open a new window.)
Moving on… Read More »
Among other things predicted by this post, TUAW is suggesting that on September 9, Apple may introduce a subscription model to their iTunes software. I’ve posted plenty of times about what I think of the idea of subscription music (see the Related Posts below if you want to see for yourself), and any of you who have read any of them know that I think the concept is a great idea. I still use Rhapsody, and I still complain about having to boot up Windows on my Mac through Parallels so I can sync music to my non iPod media player.