Picasa

T

tedwhite

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anyone use this? I'm thinking of downloading it, however, in its "system requirements" they indicate a 50GB hardrive and recommend a 100GB. I have a three-year old Dell and it only has a 30GB hardrive with 60% free space.

Any thoughts on this?

Ted
 
It depends on how many photos you have. I only have it "watching" one folder where I put files I want to work on it with.

It's actually quite a nice little package, the B&W conversion is very handy.

PS I'm also running it on a 3-year old Dell at work.
 
Ted, I'm not sure how much, if any, this will help you, but I've got version 2.0 of Picasa on my 2001 vintage Dell Inspiron 8100 running ME with no problems. My harddrive is only 10GB.
 
PIcassa itself occupies 26 MB on my computer, not alot of space. I think the space requirement is for all of the photos, which rapidly consume everything in sight. But you can always add an external disk to handle that problem. Make sure you back everything up to an external disk, too. You will soon be sorry if you don't.

I use Picassa all of the time with my JPGs. Can't beat it, especially at the price!

T.
 
Thanks, all of you. I'll give it a try. Nice to know it only takes 28MB, which is about a dozen photographs.

Ted
 
I have picassa for touch up on the photo's that I need to post on the web(my scanner isn't the greatest of quality to say the least). I love it. It's simple and not filled with useless tools which you can't even figure out how to use like Photoshop.:eek:
 
I like Picasa2, I use it for cataloging files. Cropping is its forte', it has the best cropping tool around. Also, you can enlarge to 400% quickly and easily. Besides cropping and enlarging which IMO are better than PS or PSE, it also has a much better 'read' of image information, MB, pixel counts, file names, and EXIF than PS or PSE.
 
I like the way it allows me to manage the printable space on a page of photo quality printer paper. I have very few mishaps this way. I edit/touch up on other programs and use Picasa for printing.

-Paul
 
Funny, I just discovered Picasa2 and love it, finding it more useful and easy to use than Photoshop. Although I haven't really used it yet, I like the option of converting to b&w as if through a color filter, so you can choose yellow or dark red for darker skies. It also makes it easy to upload photos or email them using gmail. And all for free! You gotta love it.
 
...and, it does real time cataloging, which means, when you move around pictures from one folder to another, it's reflected in Picasa *immediately*. Two things that I miss from Picasa that I have to use PhotoPaint for:

* Curve tuning
* Variable settings for Unsharp Mask (Picasa only has one settings and I find it too extreme for most of my scanned shots).
 
Since I'm a computer geek, I like the straight windows folders for organizing my files, including photos (albeit with the RAW thumbnailer & viewer update for XP for RAW files), but I've tried Picasa out a few times and do recommend it to people looking for organization software. It does have some cool features, and the crop/rotate tool is fancy.

I have so many images on my drive it would have a heart attack if I installed it again and had it search, haha.
 
I went ahead and installed Picasa. It organized by date and merged - again by date - all the photos in My Pictures and all the photos in Kodak Easy Share. I put all digital images into KES via card reader simply because it does a fine job of organizing by date also. And all scans go to My Pictures.

I tried printing an image through Picasa and it did a less than stellar job. I then printed the same image through PS Elements 5.0 and it was perfect.

As I already have the organization-by-date KES, I don't see much advantage to Picasa. But I'll keep it around for awhile and play with it.

Ted
 
I've been using it for a while and use it primarily to help me keep things organized--I can find a photo easily and then open that photo with the GIMP.
Ted, if you're looking for a small, basic program I can also recommend the FastStone Image Viewer. I find it basic but good. Sort of midway between Easy share and the GIMP(or photoshop, I suppose).
Link:
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm
I'm using an old and slow win 2000 machine.
Rob
 
As Rob says. Faststone is great, like Picasa. I use both and for most work prefer it above PS!
 
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