lifehacker has an article today, Organize your digital photos with Picasa, in which the author is enamored by the "ninja-like way Picasa helped me organize my photo collection." It's a semi-interesting read that raises some valid points/perspectives for how to keep track of your digital pix [1,000s in my case]. Although I'm comfortable with my methodology I always enjoy reading how others do it...maybe I'll catch a good tip or two.

Here's why Picasa is something I would stay away from:

Once you've copied or moved images around in folders within Picasa, do NOT tweak with them in Windows Explorer. I actually lost edits that I had made to two folders doing this.

That's a deal breaker for me. They've hooked you and are now just reeling you in. Ugh, now you're locked in to their app if you want all your organizational work to count for something going forward. No thanks!

I recently posted a how2 [find the date a picture was taken] that references this subject and the meaning behind my madness is this very subject...picture organization. I'm writing an app to rename all of my digital pictures based on a few select EXIF properties to keep things more organized. I'll have more on this in the near [I hope] future.

Meanwhile, an alternative to Picasa is Windows Photo Gallery, which comes with Windows Vista. Photo Gallery allows you to tag photos while importing them from your camera, make edits such as remove red-eye and cropping, and share them with family/friends. An especially nice feature, in my opinion, is that it "preserves the original 'digital negative,' so even after you edit the picture and save it, you can return it to its original form." Nice.

~tod

tags: pictures, photography