Cover that eye! Cover that frozen eye!

[reddragdiva]

I've been taking recommendations for the photo guide, particularly photo management and processing software — for when you've got a hundred two-megabyte five-megapixel images to put up, and you don't have that much web space and no-one cares about the full resolution anyway. And you still have to fix the red eye and so forth.

I was told Google Picasa was shockingly usable and technophobe-friendly, and there's a Linux version, which has a one-click install for Ubuntu. So I gave it a go.

Favourite feature: The red eye repair interface is as simple as it could possibly get and seems to actually work really well. Editing in general is fantastically easy; it's just the thing for the amateur photographer who really can't be bothered turning themselves into a Photoshop jockey. Also, the browsing interface is remarkably accessible and much less of a pain in the arse than using Konqueror (which is in turn much less of a pain in the arse than Windows Explorer, even in XP).

Bad point: Don't use it to download pics directly from the camera — it may not preserve Exif information (all the shooting data about the image). This is stupid, annoying and a dealbreaker for me; everything else does it fine and I don't see why Picasa can't. So I'll be sticking to digiKam for that one.

I hope the digiKam developers get Picasa, use it lots and work out how to make editing as ridiculously easy on digiKam.

Anyone else used Picasa?

Comments

[grega.livejournal.com]

I like ACDSee myself. Version 5.0 I'm a cheapskate who doesn't see the need to upgrade to 8.0, at least I like their Photo Editor, their Photo Manager is not so great.

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

My mum's something of a Picasa fan ;)

[reddragdiva]

Yep - it was recommended to me with "even my mother seems to approve."

KDE 4 will work on Windows and Mac, as Qt 4 for Win32/Mac will be GPL. So I'll be heartily recommending digiKam to everyone in sight. But I so so so hope they steal appropriate clues from the Picasa interface.

[new-brunette.livejournal.com]

Presumably, picasa doesn't strip the data if you're using a card reader, as that would be USB mass storage rather than the P2P method? I use a card reader exclusively anyway - can't be bothered faffing with cables and worring if the camera's got enough power to ship a gig, slowly, via USB 1.1...

[reddragdiva]

Correct - it strips the data when using PTP/PictBridge. Which is ridiculous when it's using gPhoto like everything else that doesn't strip said data. Perhaps they're after bug-for-bug compatibility with the Windows version.

[new-brunette.livejournal.com]

:)

They wouldn't want to give any one platform the competitive edge, after all...

[stevek.livejournal.com]

I'll have to give Picasa a go, especially for red eye repair. I hope it really is easy to install on Ubuntu though. ;-)

[reddragdiva]

Go here. That should start the download. When I did it, Firefox automatically offered to open it with the GDebi Package Installer. I clicked the 'install' button on that, it asked for my password, installed it and there it was in the Graphics menu.

The download is 20 MB (as opposed to 4 MB I think for Windows) because it's actually a barely-ported Windows app complete with its own custom tweak of Wine! But, it Just Works(tm) on my system.

digiKam is worth playing with, though, if you haven't, and does have good red eye reduction built in. But the Picasa interface is vastly superior.

[stevek.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'll have a tweak when I get the chance. :-)

[stevek.livejournal.com]

Gosh that was easy to load... possibly the easiest external package I've ever loaded onto Ubuntu! :-)

[reddragdiva]

Indeed. Gives a lot of promise for the future.

[davefish.livejournal.com]

Just to add another one in, I use Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/ (http://www.irfanview.com/)) for my batch processing needs. The batch mode is quite nippy, and you can get a fair bit of control over what is going on without needing to use a command line.