netnomad’s blog & grill

Have I told you lately how much I love Picasa?

Picasa is this dumb little freeware photo organizer that nobody heard about before it got bought by Google who surely everybody has heard of.

I spent the morning taking pictures with my trusty Canon Powershot S230. I shot 115 pictures. Some indoor. Some outdoor. Most of the indoor ones sucked because of the lighting in the building.

I came home. I threw my Compactflash card into my reader and launched the Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard to rename the pictures and move them to a folder in the My Pictures folder. I fired up Picasa. There everything was. I was able to quickly browse through the thumbnails and quickly triage the good shots from the bad. Most of the “iffy” shots I was even able to quickly correct. And guess what. Picasa doesn’t write over your originals. If you make a goof, your original is always there. This kind of annoyed the hell out of me for a long time before I wanted to mass-edit files and then export the whole folder and I didn’t know how to do it quickly. You click on one picture in the folder, do a Ctrl-A to select all the pictures in the folder, then hit the big “EXPORT” button on the bottom of the screen and boomla. It saves all your changes into images you can share with your friends, post on your blog, whatever. It will also generate collages, make screensaves, make gift CD’s, and a half dozen other nifty things.

For hardcore open-heart photo surgery sure… I would prefer to use Photoshop or something a little more potent. But for quick and dirty editing? You can’t beat this for free.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 8th, 2005 at 1:24 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.