General ramblings
Things are going okay for the last couple of days. Nothing particularly new or interesting to write about at the moment. So this post is more like a list of ramblings.... come to think of it, everything in my blog is more like a list of ramblings in the life of 'yet-another-software-programmer'. Ocasssionaly I do write about work or software or echo other people's point of views (which I agree with). But for the most part, I like to talk and talk.... and talk about casual stuff.
Picasa
The topic for the day is the now free Google Picassa software. I had been looking at Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 demo for some time recently and I had liked the convinience that it offered. So much so that I had called up at least 2 Adobe retailers in the city to find out what a licenced copy would cost me. Sadly, I never got any proper response and the thing persisted like that because the demo version was okay for the mean time since most of my requirements are to do with organizing the photographs into albums and viewing/searching them.
But now coming to Picasa, the following sums up my opinion:
Things are going okay for the last couple of days. Nothing particularly new or interesting to write about at the moment. So this post is more like a list of ramblings.... come to think of it, everything in my blog is more like a list of ramblings in the life of 'yet-another-software-programmer'. Ocasssionaly I do write about work or software or echo other people's point of views (which I agree with). But for the most part, I like to talk and talk.... and talk about casual stuff.
Picasa
The topic for the day is the now free Google Picassa software. I had been looking at Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 demo for some time recently and I had liked the convinience that it offered. So much so that I had called up at least 2 Adobe retailers in the city to find out what a licenced copy would cost me. Sadly, I never got any proper response and the thing persisted like that because the demo version was okay for the mean time since most of my requirements are to do with organizing the photographs into albums and viewing/searching them.
But now coming to Picasa, the following sums up my opinion:
- I was quite impressed on the usability front when I gave it a whirl recently. I distinctly remember getting a Jasc Software demo download for similar purpose, but I found the GUI was simply not good enough. I uninstalled it after the first hour or so that I used it. For me to use a photo organization software, it has to have a good interface. Picasa scores heavily on that front. Its elegant and simple. Sort of like most GNOME apps that I like. Its easy to do most stuff and is presented very neatly. The menus are not heaily nested and 'organized' in that sense.
- Another big plus is the fact that I can post images to this blog online from the app. Although I haven't tried my hand at that yet, I'm sure I will soon. Going by what I've heard from my friends it should be a nice no-hitch experience.
- I read it serves as a means to transfer photographs between friends using the app. That would be a nice thing too. I'd rather not send huge pics through mail or reduce their size by uploading to a photo album site. I would really love to send images in the actual size to my friends. So I look forward to that too.
- there is no zoom option.
- there's little image manipulation that one can do from within Picasa. The enhancement and the red eye reduction work well.... but still, it would have been good to have a few manual controls instead of only one-click operations.
- the software litters Picasa.ini files all over the hard disk (I would like to know the necessity for those files sometime, maybe I'm missing something here).
- there is no option to change a photograph's creation date timestamp. This usually gets in my way of navigating on the timeline. If I take a scanned pic and enhance it in GIMP or some app like that, then when I come back to Picasa I end up having the pic showing up as recent instead of old. Or even if I get pics in mail from a friend, they end up having a wrong timestamp. Adobe allows you to correct this.... I wish Picasa did too. I need to do some RTFM to see if there is any workaround for this issue.
- there is no Linux port for this application too. Maybe I can use it with Wine. But I'll have to try that some time at leisure. I dislike booting into Windows for specific apps. If only I could find something equivalent or better on Linux. But that requires some more search.
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