Comments on: Image Library: Moving from Extensis Portfolio to Google’s Picasa

By: rachelreuben

rachelreuben — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:52:00 +0000

I left that position more than a year ago, so unfortunately I no longer have information to share as we use a completely different system (Cumulus) where I am now.

By: Matt Cassity

Matt Cassity — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:37:00 +0000

I’m in the middle of finding a DAM solution for an 13 year old art museum with spotty archives. Picasa seems like a dream if we can set it up for multi-user. Many other sites are warning against it. Would love to hear more about the manual you developed.

By: NABH

NABH — Tue, 24 May 2011 07:56:00 +0000

I really appreciate your post and you explain each and every point very well.Thanks for sharing this information.And I’ll love to read your next post too.
Regards:
NABH

By: bison

bison — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:08:00 +0000

Good luck figuring out the order in which your files will show up on Picassa. I have been using it for a couple years and it is frustrating—when you add a folder to Picassa, it is anybody’s guess where they show up….

By: bison

bison — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:08:49 +0000

By: Bertold

Bertold — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:56:01 +0000

Great post! I am looking for a long time for a database to catalogue my image library (10000 diapositives, a quickly growing quantity of digital images and a lot of scans for educational purpuses). First I documented by hand (until the 80s), then I changed to Atari and 1995 to Filemaker, documenting only metadata, then I changed to Portfolio enjoying its proper previews.
It has great features, a lot of possibilities to arrange “assets” as they call the files and it leaves the files where they are. To edit the images you have to switch to any other program – I am using Photoshop. To save the originals you should save with a different name, changing from jpg to tif, png, psd or so.
There are many features for keywords and other criteria, individually changeable and automatically usable. Great but confusing!
You can store all of your images together with the catalogue on a CD/DVD. Extensis offers a free reader; so you or your friends have all of your information but don’t need the complete program.

My problems began when I bought a MacBook and wanted to use one Portfolio-file, transferable from MacBook to iMac and vice versa. But Portfolio uses absolute adresses. Therefore you have always to change these adresses by script after having transferred files!! The only reasonable workflow was to use the same external harddrive connected to the actually used computer.

I tried iPhoto but I don’t understand its logic at all. iPhoto saves everything in one folder “iLibrary” – but you can’t use it with the finder. You can export a photo, but which version? You can edit with Photoshop, but not decide where to save the new image. When you change the filename, iPhoto does’t find it any more.You can’t use two libraries at a time. It is very comfortable but only for hobby-users who don’t have too special ideas what to do with the images. If you want to change from the filename “IMG_01234″ to an imagename “snail group 1″ you lose the filename. iPhoto shows the imagname, but keeps the filename, which appears in the exported file. You can’t sort by filename. You can’t include videoclips.

When searching alternatives it seemed to me, that most of the programs (Lightroom, Aperture, ACDSee) are specialized in editing and there are only few features to structure and comment the files with hierarchical keywords or folders.

Now I am going to try Adobe Bridge, which offers editable keywords, keeps the files in their folders and uses my structure wihin the finder. But I don’t get a catalogue! Everything is saved wihtin the datafile. Advantage or disadvantage?

Inspired by your post, I will have a look at Picasa as well.
What about videoclips?

By: Website design

Website design — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:35:04 +0000

I have used Picasa 2.5 beta, it is really good. Great for allowing you to organise, edit and share your photos. It’s free too which is a rarity. Thanks for this information, it has highlighted some crucial areas for me.

By: Sandip Saini

Sandip Saini — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:18:18 +0000

This post is superb. You have a real good knowledge about this subject. The way you wrote very nice.
Thanks!!!1111

By: Alex Wu

Alex Wu — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:11:46 +0000

Thanks, I am going to try Picasa, I had the older version, wasn’t too impressive. But I will check it out again, got a lot of image files that I’d like to catalog and show online.

By: website design tampa

website design tampa — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:56:35 +0000

I used Picasa 2.5 beta, which is great (still some bugs, for example on FTP brilliant-idea-but-not-working-well-yet). I am not sure it is out of beta. I install it right now from Picasa.Google.com and… surprize: I get back to 2.2.0. So, it’s not out of beta, or at least they did not change on the homepage and the exe file!