Category: Software Review

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.

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.

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.

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 is second on my list of free image viewers, after FastStone Image Viewer. I have been using Adobe Lightroom 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 metadata is compatible with Adobe Lightroom but it gave me great insight into how the XMP framework looks like.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.