Anybody use \"Picasa\" software? If not, I need a

[Double Down]

I've been looking for a program that will allow you to organize photos into digital "albums" and will allow you to assign keywords to each photo to allow for searching across albums. Most of the program that I've tried (i.e., Roxio PhotoSuite, Jasc Photo Shot, ACDSee, etc) focus more on editing than they do on organization. I'm looking for something that heavily focuses on organization and has a pleasant layout. Picasa looks to be the best so far, but I can't seem to find any reviews of it and don't want to buy it if it's not any good. Any thoughts?

[dn7elson]

I use Thumbs Plus. It also has a Canon RAW plug-in that allows you to view and print RAW format files.

http://www.cerious.com

[ken-w]

Like Dale, I also use Thumbsplus.

Another program that is getting some good reviews is iMatch - www.photools.com/index.html

[onehotrx7]

Have a look at Compupic Pro from PhotoDex - there's a demo version available on the web... while it's strong for the basic editing features like cropping, colour correction, resizing, batches, etc, it's also handy for organization, offline volumes, etc... and it's by far the quickest thing I've used so far... Burn CD's direct from the software... all the stuff that you'd do on a day to day basis using a normal browser and photoshop for editing you can handle on here... great stuff!!

Cheers,
Stuart

[Roger_Cavanagh]

Stuart,

I downloaded the trial version of Picasa and played with it for a couple of weeks without buying. I downloaded the T+ evaluation and paid for it within two hours. :)

I have used Image Expert, which was bought by Jasc and turned in Aftershot. I liked it except it could not read the EXIF data on anything other than JPGs straight out of the camera. So I couldn't see the EXIF from my D30 converted raw images, and it wouldn't read raw at all. However, I thought the key word capability, which was hierarchical and user-definable was pretty good.

I've had a copy of iMatch for some time, but never use it because it was far too complicated for what I wanted. I just wasn't prepared to go through the pain of the learning curve. I kept picking it up and then giving up on it again.

T+ catalogues images in the folders it finds them, but you can create galleries that are selections of images from anywhere.

The iMatch cataloguing is more sophisticated than T+ as it uses a hierarchical system, whereas T+ works on independent key words and phrases. If you have an enormous number of key words, I can see that this could become cumbersome. However, T+ uses a back-end database to store catalogue data. The single-user default is MS Access, so it should be straightforward to build custom extensions.

T+ also allows you to edit the IPTC data. However, as with EXIF fields, the data must be copied to the T+ database to be searchable. Mind you, that's dead simple. In addition, you can create user fields to give further structure.

Regards,