Word about Picasa

Wild Hairs!

Picasa, the free Google photo managing program, worked as my main photo program for several years. If heavy lifting was ever required, I did have a version of Adobe Photoshop.

Picasa even helped out when I had photos to show to clients and as long as they didn't need high resolution pictures, the images were downloaded. Otherwise, the client could make some choices and tell me which photos they wanted and I'd get the full res photos to the client some other way.

Picasa has always had its limits and I hit those limits head on. All it took was a more serious client and a far more serious photo shoot. What I had after the photo session was almost 1,000 images to sort through and organize into categorical folders. The client wanted both the RAW file and a JPEG copy.

I used Picasa like I always did to pull the photos out of the camera and create and store in folders on the computer. That part of Picasa works like a charm, always has, and I think I'll keep using it that way. But when it came time to start sorting and creating folders within Picasa, the process no longer flowed.

First, when you make your selections with ctrl/click and then use the "move to new folder" feature, every image is converted from RAW to JPEG. There's no way to just move a RAW file to another folder within Picasa. Likewise with the "export" option. While JPEG copies were needed in this instance, I had to revert to the Windows file system and move the RAW files separately.

Ick. And of course I was way down the rabbit hole so I had to just grind out the process. Picasa is still a great little program for general purposes so I'm going to keep it around and keep using it. But I'm going to have to upgrade the management software if this sort of job keeps coming along.