Picasa, one of the easier to use digital photo management utilties is now free. Apparently, Google has bought them out (which is interesting in itself)  and they’re offering it for download now.

http://www.picasa.com/google/?

This software is similar to “iFoto” and extremely easy to use with a pleasant interface. It’s highly recommended if you don’t have any type of management software already and it has a few built-in tools for photo correction.

You may just want to try it out since the price is right.  :wink:

Thanks for the info.. looks a lot like iphoto and should be ideal for my father to keep track of his photos.

My favorite image manager is back with version 2.0 and it’s better than ever. You can’t beat the price: FREE

http://www.picasa.com/

It’s faster, more compatible, and as easy to use as before. It’s highly recommended.

it’s was better than iphoto 4 until recently apple came out with new iphoto 5!

Picasa can display video files too(before iphoto 4 can do it).  Love the Timeline feature! Cool!

Thanks for the link gr00vy0ne!  I’ve used Paint Shop Pro 7 and Adobe Photoshop for my image editing, but I’ve really never used anything for organizing my photos.  I just downloaded this, and I’ll be experimenting with it later this evening.

Thanks again!

I have tried the Picasa2 and quite like it indeed! By the way, I have a big question here:

OK, when you do the Basic Fixes thing, for example, if I click the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’, then Picasa will automatically fix my picture with the best setting. The question is after fixing the picture, is there any way to save changes of the ‘fixed’ picture? I mean to directly OVERWRITE the original file without have to use the ‘Save a Copy’ option/export file?

As I can see, without saving the changes into a NEW copy, the changes can only be seen in Picasa, i.e. if you open the file in other program, it is still in original condition. So if there is no way that Picasa can directly overwrite the original file after changes made on a large batch of files, it will gonna be a pain in the ass to have to save a copy of a WHOLE batch of NEW files in order to save fixed picture. Hope you’ve got what I mean… :wink:

Any idea gr00vy0ne /anyone?

Patrick

Picasa is awesome. The collage feature makes awesome wallpaper for my tr5. Thanks for posting the link to Picasa. Its great.

i am downloading now to try, thanks for the link! years ago i purchased a lifetime subscription for http://www.photools.com/ imatch, and i have had mixed results with it (good and bad). but i have over 50,000 images catalogued on hard drives, dvds, cds, etc.. for some, a photo database is an essential utility and most image databases i have used are not very elegant, but critical for what i do on a computer. 

Here is the plus side for Imatch 3.4.0.30:
* can handle large numbers and offline images (caches thumbs from things like photo CDs).
* customizable scripting for just about anything u can imagine.
* really great search engine; can search on things like visually similar and similar color, just to name a few.
* backup DB function and multiple databases.
* wizard keeps things automatically up to date.
Some of the negatives:
* support is via yahoo group forum
* costs 60 USD now
* purchase and registration thru share-it.com (a nightmare)

Well, enough said about that, i just installed picaso2 and it’s pretty cool for the price, albiet a bit slow crawling thru my images….good luck!
jigs

Can anyboby tell me if picaso can be used as a browser? What I mean is that it views images, corrects, runs a slideshow etc etc… without actually importing the files into it’s own directory. Iphoto is great but it duplicates photo’s everytime you import them, hence you run into the problem of running out of disk space in a short period of time.

Cheers

p.s - The best software I have found for organizing lot’s of shots whilst not moving them anywhere is iview media pro.

Picasa doesn’t move files. I have my files scattered around about half a dozen places and servers and they all stay put. I love the fact that Picasa can read and index .PSD files.

Picasa doesn’t mess with pre-existing directories of photos so you can use it to view. It will want to import the picture details into it’s own database but not the actual files. Also, it’s dynamic so if you move/delete/add pictures, it will update itself accordingly.

I’ll try it out later today. So far I’ve been using ACDSee, and v7 right now isn’t doing it for me… The program has become too bloated and full of useless junk. So it’s time for something new. Thanks for the tip!