Picasa - any drawbacks? or alternatives?

br1anstorm

I'm looking for freeware to organise and edit my photos. Picasa does both and gets good ratings. But after reading lots of forums and reviews, it looks as if it may make sense to use two programmes - one to organise pics into folders/albums, and another to edit the actual photo images.
For editing, my shortlist is FastStone or IrfanView (I want user-friendliness and don't need complex effects, so have ruled out the Gimp and PhotoFiltre). Any expert comment on which is better and why?
But for organising, I'm hesitating over Picasa because I've read that it inserts itself all over your hard drive (.ini files in every folder), grabs photos from wherever they are stored, won't let you reorganise/rename folders or albums, and if you edit photos within it, you "lose" the original because it overwrites it.... Are these criticisms well-founded? And if so, any suggestions for other photo-organisers? Has anyone had experience of Preclick?

Rgds - br1anstorm

GoofyGAT

Try the excellent Paint.NET for editing & the free edition of Adobe Photoshop Album for organising. G

P.S. There's also the free HP Photosmart Essential

duncansby

Hi - in my experience Picasa has been one of the best downloads ever. To answer some of your queries if you edit the photos and save them, it stores the originals in a back up folder if you wish.

It monitors the folders you wish it to, and you can move and edit photos to your hearts content.

I'm not sure about the .ini files, as far as I can make out it puts them in folders it is monitoring, but I could be wrong on that one.

TheFaqqer

Hi,

I'm not sure that Picassa overwrites the original file (if it does, just copy it first, same as you would with any other picture editing program) - it has undo functionality built in though.

I used to use it for re-sizing my photos and storage, but now I upload my photos to Flickr instead, as it's a backup as well.

As Duncansby says - you choose which folders to monitor, and I've moved photos between folders, renamed them, without problem. I still use it occasionally, since it has a nice feature to create slideshows and burn them onto CD - great for sending to the relatives!

Faqqer

Speedster2

picasa won't let you reorganise/rename folders or albums

Balderdash, it is a simple couple of steps to rename folders and attach descriptions to photos.

dot111

I've been using it for a couple of years, really easy, no problems and easy for emailing.

Marty999

I agree with the other posters, Picasa is really good, and simple to use. You don't get anything like the degree of control that other programs give, but for me (and I suspect most users) it does everything I need. And no, it doesn't over wite your original pics.

br1anstorm

Speedster2 wrote:

picasa won't let you reorganise/rename folders or albums

Balderdash, it is a simple couple of steps to rename folders and attach descriptions to photos.

Hmmm, OK then. Source for the original info about Picasa's apparent inflexibility was the review pages of Snapfiles (software download site). See some of the comments - here's the link http://www.snapfiles.com/opinions/Picasa/Picasa.html

Maybe the explanation is that in order to be user-friendly, Picasa does things to your computer invisibly and automatically behind the scenes. More convenient, but means less control?

Thanks all the same for your advice!

krishna

Been using Picasa for a year now. It really is easy to use. Switched to it from Photoshop LE. It automates a lot of the simple editing one might want to do and cropping allows you to specify the size of print you want so that you automatically crop to create an image with the correct ratio of height to width. Like with Google's search engine, it has an "I'm feeling lucky" button which automatically makes changes to give you what it thinks is going to give a good photo (colour, contrast, brightness changes etc). OK, it's not a professional tool, but it sure makes most of my photo editing a doddle.

It does not overwrite you photo, it stores all changes in a separate file. This means you can reverse them AT ANY TIME. The downside of storing the changes in a separate file is that you can't then just copy or email a particular image since if you do you would be using the ORIGINAL image, not the edited one. To get the edited one you need to export the image to a new file.

I still go back to photoshop occasionally, but in most cases I find Picasa more than adequate and a real time saver.

For me the worst part of Picasa is the "filing system". It tries to simplify things by bringing all images from all folders together in a single listing. I actually find this a bit of a nuisance and rather confusing. Seems to make navigating around my photo collection more complicated. Of course may be I just haven't worked out how to use that part properly.

cwoodham

krishna wrote:

For me the worst part of Picasa is the "filing system". It tries to simplify things by bringing all images from all folders together in a single listing. I actually find this a bit of a nuisance and rather confusing. Seems to make navigating around my photo collection more complicated. Of course may be I just haven't worked out how to use that part properly.

Yes this put me off it too. Have a look at Faststone Image Viewer. It was recommended on another thread here. I prefer it to Picasa. For one thing it uses the Windows type folder view.

A_Clock

cwoodham wrote:

Yes this put me off it too. Have a look at Faststone Image Viewer. It was recommended on another thread here. I prefer it to Picasa. For one thing it uses the Windows type folder view.

I'll 2nd that! I uninstalled picasa, after trying it :j