[svlug] Photo sorting software

[David E. Fox]

On Wed, 06 Sep 2006 14:08:43 -0400
Beartooth <beartooth at adelphia.net> wrote:

>
> I got it and fired it up. It looks pretty daunting to me, but certainly
> very powerful; and some of the daunting may be due to the fact that I do
> very little with pix, beyond using them for desktop backgrounds ...
> 
> (I'd be glad to hear more about this one from linux people, btw.)

Picasa does a good job at letting you play with the photos. On the
other hand, its footprint is quite a lot bigger than digikam, gwenview,
and the like.

Picasa is fairly intuitive, and does let you do some basic image
editing (such as redeye reduction and improving lighting) by using a
few simple clicks; that would be doable e.g., in gimp, but it just
seems that it's easier to do it in Picasa.

Moving files between folders seems to be easy enough, as one just drags
a thumbnailed image from one directory to another. However, renaming
seems to be absent. For instance, you can add a label and other
descriptive metadata about the picture (place taken, and so forth) that
will stay with the picture so long as you are viewing/organizing yuor
pictures with Picasa. Outside,it seems to be missing. Also, Picasa
stores image catalogs using sequential numbers somewhat like the
cameras do (image01.jpg...image15.jpg, for instance, and so your first
picture taken in another 'album' (i.e., subdirectory) will also bec
called image01.jpg, which makes moving things around less intuitive
than it should be, but it is still possible to do so.

One thing I don't like - picture labels segregate the picture so
labelled into its own 'folder' although it still stays in the folder
where it was. it would be easier if I would just click on a picture and
the label/caption would come up by itself. Removing it from the label
removes the caption info. That to me is counterintuitive.

USB coonnection import works fairly well, perhaps a bit slow. One nice
thing (which could be a downside, depending how you use your computer)
is that part of the program sits in the background, and it'll pop up
when you plug the camera in - and begin to import pictures.

But it (seems to be) a horrific memory pig, but that may be because
it's running on top of Wine - it really is a Windows program (like
googleearth in that respect.



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