I used to use Photoshop to edit digital photos. But it was getting a bit long in the tooth, so I switched over to the Gimp, which has more than enough functionality for my needs. But, with the recent release of Picasa 2, I felt obliged to give it a go. I had tried Picasa before, but I didn't seem to offer enough for me to learn how it worked properly. This version seemed to offer a lot more, so it looked to be in my interests to fully explore it.
I'm used to graphics editors, where you load a picture, edit it, then save it, often to a different file. Picasa is a photo manager, not just a photo editor, so it works a bit differently. To load a picture, the picture must be in one of the folders that Picasa is monitoring.
When you modify a picture in Picasa, perhaps crop it, and do some red-eye reduction, then Picasa uses its picasa.ini file (stored in the same folder as the photo) to store the details of the modifications that you make. Although within Picasa it looks like the picture has changed, it hasn't really. Picasa never modifies your original picture. However, when you want to use the modified picture outside of Picasa then you can export it, or do as Save As.
This is a whole new way of operating for me. Instead of ending up with a multitude of altered pictures, I end up with the original plus a description of the modifications. For example, if I want to email the picture using Picasa's built-in Gmail facility, then I don't even need to export the picture, and it can be resized automatically.
Briefly:
- The picture tuning features are much easier to use than The Gimp's (and Photoshop's), so you're much more likely to fix up pictures before you get them printed.
- I used Picasa's labelling feature to categorise the pictures that I will be sending off to get printed. It's very similar to Gmail's label system.
- You can make Picasa rename your photos to include the date in the filename of the photo. Then, when they get printed professionally, this information will be printed on the back.
Finally, and most importantly, everything comes together in a package with such a great UI that anyone can have a go a fixing and organising their photos. And it's free.