Organize Pictures » Software Review

3 simple settings for improving your Picasa experience

vlad — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 06:00:19 +0000

Picasa is a powerful program that provides lots of ways to customize your experience making it suitable for your specific needs. By learning how to change working parameters for your Picasa installation, you can use Picasa the way you want to. You can not only make Picasa work faster, but you can also learn how to configure it so that Picasa provides greater convenience on the most common tasks. Today's article will focus on three simple Picasa settings that will help you see your image folders, import your pictures more conveniently and identify your pictures easier.

3 simple ways to speed up Picasa

vlad — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 06:00:37 +0000

Picasa is a great digital asset management software. If you have been reading my blog, you know that I have struggled with Picasa over the years. I have installed it many times only to uninstall it days later. This has all changed recently when they have released version 3.8, when Picasa started supporting the XMP standard regarding image metadata. XMP coupled with the correct integration of IPTC image tags in addition to beautiful support for EXIF geotagging, determined me to start using Picasa again. And this time I have not uninstalled it. Now that I am a dedicated Picasa user, I will start sharing a few tips for making Picasa do what you want. In this article I will be sharing a few simple tips for making Picasa run faster.

How to choose the right software for organizing your pictures

vlad — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 22:42:23 +0000

I get asked pretty often what is the right software for organizing pictures. I usually answer with: it depends. It truly does depend. It depends on what you are are hoping to achieve. I tend to recommend free software first, depending how far the person has gone on the picture organization path. If specific commercial goals are in mind, then I recommend powerful commercial software that go beyond what a home user needs. So, what is the right software for organizing your pictures? Read on to find out how I think about this issue.

Picasa is making small but steady steps to becoming an excellent photo management software system

vlad — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 23:36:02 +0000

My experience with Picasa has been very inconsistent over the years. I believe I have installed and uninstalled Picasa at least five or six times that I remember. Most of the times, I have uninstalled Picasa because I hated how it handled my physical file folder...it was just frustrating to not be able to directly see my file folders the way they were laid out on my hard drive. Recently however, Picasa has made several steps the pretty much removed all my frustrations with the product. Lately I have installed Picasa again and this time it seem like it will stay...at least for a while. Read on to find out what I like about the new version of Picasa.

How to choose the perfect digital photography software

vlad — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 01:47:46 +0000

Have you ever thought that you just found the perfect digital photography software? You got excited and said that you have finally found what you were looking for. Of course you did...I did...many times! After a while however, I noticed that the reason for my changing the digital photography software was different. Read on to find out.

Understand all digital photography software programs.

vlad — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 01:54:27 +0000

There are many digital photography software programs today that help you organize your digital pictures. Some are called image viewers while others are called digital asset management programs. They can be free of charge or can cost hundreds of dollars to buy. How can one make sense of all these options? It is actually pretty simple because there are essentially three categories of image management programs. Read on to find out what they are.

Transform pictures in XnView

vlad — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 03:53:03 +0000

Digital photography gives us extreme flexibility. We can take the picture once and then use it for many different purposes. Pictures can easily be cropped, re sized and saved in different formats. There are many ways to transform your pictures but XnView makes transforming your pictures very easy.

XnView Review

vlad — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 02:11:51 +0000

XnView is second on my list of free image viewers, after FastStone Image Viewer. I have been playing recently with Adobe Lightroom 3.0 Beta version and wanted to test compatiblity with XnView when it comes to image keywords. So, I downloaded XnView again and installed it to my computer in order to see what is new. To my surprise I noticed right away that XnView has improved its ablity to handle image metadata. Not only that XnView was compatible with Adobe Lightroom 3.0, but it gave me great insight into how the XMP framework looks like.

Image metadata in Ligthtroom and Picasa is compatible.

vlad — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:45:00 +0000

Is Picasa image metadata compatible with Lightroom? The short answer is yes...but. However, this short answer has to be gualified. They are compatible because of Lightroom and not because of Picasa. Or in other words Lightroom is backward compatible. Read on to see the specifics.

Adobe Lightroom version 3.0 BETA

vlad — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:50:11 +0000

Adobe Lightroom v 3.0 Beta has been released for sometime now. You can download it too and play with it. You can even send your feedback to Adobe. I believe the software will work until April of 2010 when they are planning to release the commercial version. See link at the bottom of this article to download Adobe Lightroom 3.0 Beta.

What’s really cool in Picasa 3.5

vlad — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:25:16 +0000

Picasa has recently released version 3.5 according to the Picasa blog. They have not updated everyone yet, meaning that when you open up Picasa, it would not prompt you to update. However, you can download the new version if you want. I did that yesterday and played with some of the new features. I believe the new version has some cool new things and some that...well, I'm not sure.

Picasa is getting pretty good…finally

vlad — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 08:27:27 +0000

I have had a love-hate relationship with Picasa over the years ever since Google bought the company behind Picasa. I have installed it and uninstalled it many times over the years. Every time a major version would come out I would install it again and play with it but every time I ended up uninstalling it. Recently, however I have installed it again and it might just stay longer on my computer this time. Read on to find out why.

There is one big difference between image viewers and DAM software

vlad — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 06:58:07 +0000

Many of the conflicts in life originate from misunderstanding. Whether it's between husband and wife, between parents and children or between friends, conflicts can be easily solved if we would all be more careful about what we say and if we would all be better listeners. These things are also true when it comes to photo management. Some people talk about organizing their pictures others talk about digital asset management. Both groups talk essentially about the same thing but using different terms. In this article I will try to outline some of the differences between these two terms and the tools that are used for each.

ACDSee – You need the Pro version for portable keywords

vlad — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:07:34 +0000

I am continuing my quest for a cheap image organizer software. What I am looking for is pretty simple: I want the ability to create keywords and organize them into categories so I can apply them to my pictures in a somewhat orderly fashion. Then, I also want the ability to save my keywords to IPTC/XMP tags into my image files so that my keywords become portable. This time I am looking at ACDSee.

iMatch – an exercise in frustration

vlad — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:01:39 +0000

In my quest to find an alternative for Adobe Lightroom I was told to give iMatch a try because it would do what I need. So I proceeded to try doing the same exercise in keywording that I have done with Adobe Lightroom. However, I can't really write much about it because I couldn't do it and I got very frustrated with the software.

Adobe Lightroom – an exercise in keywording

vlad — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:43:48 +0000

I have been looking for a long time for some software that would allow me to manage keywords in an efficient manner. What do I mean by efficient? It's pretty simple: all I want is the ability to group my keywords into categories or domains. For example: I want car, boat, ship, carriage, bus and bicycle to all be grouped into a domain called transportation. This seems simple, but I can't really find any decently priced :) software to do that. Now, I was suspecting that Adobe Lightroom might do what I wanted but the price was way too much for me! Eventually I decided to give Lightroom a try and found out why people like it.

FastStone Image Viewer – simply the best free image viewer

vlad — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:07:13 +0000

Is there a great Image Viewer out there...one that is simple to use and...FREE? I believe there is...it's called Fast Stone Image Viewer. I have tried many image viewers and photo organization software and found only a few decent ones. Out of all the ones I have tried, FastStone Image Viewer is really the best! This article outlines the features of this great program.

Software Review – XnView

vlad — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:38:46 +0000

XnView is a great FREE image viewer. It comes to us from France. Who says the French can't write good software? Hmmm...maybe nobody...I just heard it somewhere :) . I have tried many free image viewers and photo organization software and found only a few decent ones. Commercial software is somewhat better but you can find FREE software that works the same sometimes better than commercial software. XnView is one example of FREE image viewers that works great.