Mi Casa, Tu Casa, Picasa...

Been playing around with Picasa from Google lately. Its a photo editing/photo organizing program. Also playing with Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 3, the eval of which for some reason likes to crash when I launch it about 70 % of the time.

Photoshop CS is overkill for what I do, I think, even though I’m using it for some things too. If I could find one application that would let me do my basic editing and composition and also database and organize the photo files, I’d be a very happy camper. I think either Picasa or Elements can do this, and with several thousand photos on the HD and another thousand from this trip, organizing, logging and being able to find all this stuff is going to be a challenge if I don’t start right now.

I wonder if either of these apps has an offline storage capability, where I can archive photos to a CD or DVD but still have the thumbnail and an indication of where the master is within the app/DB. Had a program for the Mac many, many years ago that organized media like that – don’t know what that is in the Windows world.

I found my favorite Picasa feature this morning. Select a handful of photos, click two buttons and *poof* out spits a photo collage like these. Great little gimmick… I’m sure I’ll tire of it before long, but what a great way to summarize and idea or trip with very little work. Pretty slick!