The Vine: November 29, 2007
Hi, Sars —
I have a software-related question I hope you or your readers could help me with. My boyfriend mentioned that he wanted some sort of picture software. Basically, I think he wants something that helps organize digital pictures, resize them, and maybe edit them, too. He has a ton of pictures on his laptop; some are duplicates, and a lot have those strange default names like “00DTHS*ioh%fed” or whatever.
The only thing I really know about is Adobe Photoshop, and my impression of it is that it’s more editing and making funny Fark-type entries, and less organizing, but I could be totally wrong. Any ideas?
Thank you so much!
Miracle on 34th Street
Dear Miracle,
If all he wants to do is pull all the photos into one folder/organizer, Picasa might work for that — but I only use it to make all my photos into a screensaver, so I’m not really sure what other capabilities it has. For editing and tuning and so on, I use Photoshop Elements, which is a simpler and cheaper version of Photoshop.
Readers?
Tags: Ask The Readers rando
I tried googling “iphoto for windows,” because iphoto is really all any sane person needs for organizing and editing. And I assume Miracle’s boyfriend isn’t on a mac, or he’d already be using it. Anyway, picasa is what came up, with many people saying it comes as close as anything to iphoto for windows.
For just organizing, I can also heartily recommend flickr.com. He can share the photos or not, his choice; put them into sets; tag them, etc. As a bonus, they’re safe if his hard drive ever goes belly up. A little over $20 a year gets one unlimited access.
As a Photoshop alternative, The GIMP is highly praised freeware that routinely makes “essential downloads” lists.
Paint.Net is another free alternative for doing simpler photo editing tasks, but I haven’t played with it yet.
Can’t help you on the organizing.
I agree with Sars, Picasa is great for photo organization, I think that is what its main purpose is. (that and the great screensaver). Its very intuitive (in my opinion) and it does a great job smelling out EVERY graphic on your computer for you, for those times that you save them to weird places. It also does VERY basic editing.
Picasa does have some basic tuning & editing capabilities, and it’s FREE, so he can try it out and then if he needs more functionality upgrade to something he’d have to pay for.
I don’t use anything more than Picasa for my photo organization, etc.
For just general rotating, cropping and simple adjustments I use the Microsoft Office Picture Manager. It’s on XP systems under Microsoft Office Tools.
For slightly more complicated editing (getting rid of zits, making things black and white or sepia) I use the trial version of FX Foto.
Flickr is a good uploading site definitely. I think it’s fun and easy to use and it LOOKS good.
Ditto on Paint.Net for editing. My Canon digital camera came with an organizing program called ZoomBrowser, so if the BF has a camera, he might want to look through the various accessory discs for that or a similar program.
Picasa2 (the current version you download from Google) lets you organize, resize, crop, edit red eye, straighten horizons, brighten, change from color to b/w, sepia, etc., sharpen, and much much more. Plus it handles RAW picture files which is pretty incredible for free software.
My camera came with the software that I use to manage my photos. It’s an HP product, so my home computer has HP Photosmart on it to edit, resize, remove red eye, etc, etc with. It can be downloaded from HP’s website for free.
I just store all my photos in folders within my hard drive, so I’m not sure I understand the organization aspect of the question. I label my folders by month and year (right now, I’m filling up a “November 2007” folder, for example), and then within those folders I have folders titled by event (i.e. “Wedding Day,” “Honeymoon,” “Blogger Meetup,” etc, etc…). Maybe I’m misunderstanding that part of the question, though.
Not sure if this was helpful at all, really! But hopefully it’ll help Miracle to know that if her boyfriend has a digital camera, it’s likely it came with software that helps him edit and manage his photos accordingly.
I haven’t found a single program that I like for organizing (do you want online or not?), but for doing stuff like batch conversions and resizing, simple editing and slide show I use IrfanView. Also takes can use plugins, works with scanners and I believe can handle almost every format. Free, very light weight on the memory (unlike gimp) and easier to use than gimp.
http://www.irfanview.com/
But for more serious work… use gimp and be sure to install the help file and go to the library and get a book on its use. Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional is a decent one.
I agree with GIMP as a Photoshop alternative. I don’t know about organization, but it’s great for just the basic or even not-so-basic editing you need to do on your pictures. It’s free, so he should definitely check it out to see if it fits his needs. If he does need more, then you can go from there.
I second (third? fourth?) the recommendation for Picasa. Not only is it easy to organize your photos into folders, you can also put them into ‘albums’ – essentially, allowing you to tag them, so you can have a cross-reference. You can also upload them pretty easily (I use my gmail account, but I think you may be able to host them elsewhere, too).
Photoshop is a professional-level tool – if you’re a casual hobbyist, it will just make you weep. Very powerful, but not known for it’s intuitive interface (although it’s gotten better over the years, I think). I’ve heard good things about Photoshop Elements, though as someone else said above, Picasa has basic photo-editing capabilities.
I second Bill’s IrfanView recommendation. On a road trip a year ago I took over 3000 photos and it was very nice to be able to rename them from the camera gobbledegook in batches.
We use Picasa for all our organizing needs, you can just plug in your camera’s photo card and then sort once you see it onscreen. It also lets you crop and resize, and it uploads to Flickr.com very easily…so we have both the photos online and on the computer (the online ones are the good ones that we want to share with people, but it doubles as “security”). Good luck!
Picasa is great and SIMPLE. Highly recommended!
I would also heartily recommend Microsoft Office Picture Manager for the resizing/red-eye reducing that your boy is looking for. It’s very easy to use, and really does quite a bit for being such a basic program.
I second Irfanview for if you just want to look at, resize, or save your photos as a different file type. It’s small, it’s free, and it loads way faster than Photoshop Elements, GIMP, or Microsoft’s picture viewer.
But if you want Photoshop-level editing, GIMP is the best free alternative.
I am a big Photoshop fan, and I don’t really use it for any of the weird Fark-type stuff you mentioned. I do run all of my photos through it for basic color adjustments and stuff, and it does amazing things to even fairly effed-up pics. I hear GIMP is a great alternative, but I’ve never tried it. As for storage, I use Picasa some, but mostly use my own basic dated folders on the computer system, with occasional backups to dvd.
luvrhino mentioned The GIMP and as a user who also knows how to use photoshop, I find this opensource piece of software is great to use. It has all your basic edit functions plus more complex functionality for creating layered pieces. It’s also FREE so means if you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter.
And like Christina says, Flickr is an excellent sharing resource. I use it to not only share, but also for research, looking up members dining experiences, decor experiences, places to travel etc… The comments and explanation abilities mean you can share a photo with words, adding links etc.
I like picassa but the version I used in 2004 did some wacky labelling of the files that didn’t work on other viewers.
I like Kodak EasyShare software for easy organization, editing, and emailing/uploading. It’s free on the kodak website.
Just wanted to leave a word of warning re Irfanview – I used it for years and it was free and very easy to operate, but when I moved into web editing a year ago our developer pointed out it damages jpegs slightly and darkens them up. You probably wouldn’t notice if you’re not too fussy though. However, PhotoShop Elements is excellent and offers everything useful proper PhotoShop does at a fraction of the price.
For Mac users who don’t have (or don’t like) iPhoto, GraphicConverter is hard to beat. It’s will interface with your camera; tag, categorize, and assign keywords to images; and allows one to edit and convert files from one format to another. A generous free trial version is available at lemkesoft.com. You can keep using it after the trial expires, but it will take longer and longer to load each time!
Miracle is right, Photoshop is an extremely sophisticated editor, not an organizer. Adobe Bridge claims to handle that job but i have never found it very useful. I’ve been in graphics a long time, though, and might just be set in my stodgy old ways =)
Thanks for all the ideas, you guys. I had no idea there would be so many free options. I was planning on coughing up some money for a Christmas present, but this sounds much better! I’m definitely going to check out Picasa. I don’t want online organization – I’d like to actually find an organization system for the computer.
Bill, Sara: your irfanview descriptions sound like it’s exactly what I’m looking for, too. Have you noticed the damage to files that Josie mentioned? Josie, is there some way to avoid the damage?
Also, all thanks for your views on PhotoShop Elements. I’m always hesitant to buy the “lesser” versions of software, but it sounds like this one might actually be worth it.
Thanks!
I have not noticed damage – but then again, I’m an average user. When you save it gives you options on the quality during saving. For example, you can save the image at 80% quality, or 75%, etc. which then reduces the size of the file as well. Maybe keep it at 100%? I would guess that once you take an original file and modify it in any way there will be loss, it is a conversion…. unless you always have the RAW to work with which is how archives work. Keep original, save dumbed down one to reduce load time.
Adobe Album is nice for keeping notes with your photos so you can find them later and it will even archive them out to CDs and keep track of the CDs if you need to free up disk space. It looks like there’s a free version of it, too.
I really like ACDSee it grabs all of your pics and loads them into directories really simply and quickly. It also has some photo editing capabilities. They offer a free trial so it might be something worth checking out.
I use ACDSee, too, but if I were to buy one now, I’d get Adobe Elements because it’s consistently rated higher by PC Magazine.
Picasa is useful, but don’t bother using keywords or stars because they’re lost if you go to other software. You want something that will put the ratings and keywords in the IPTC area of the JPEG or TIFF itself. Microsoft’s free PhotoInfo add-on is good for that, and ACDSee can do it as well. (I’m not sure about Elements.)
Another Picasa2 fan here. The edits are actually pretty good for a free program…until I got Photoshop Elements 5.0, I actually preferred Picasa’s redeye edit to PE’s. Another plus is that it does not edit the original file. I also like that you can upload the Picasa-edited photos directly to any of several photo printing services such as dotPhoto, Shutterfly, and the like, (thereby enabling you to pick and choose based on whatever criteria are important to you–for me, it’s whichever is offering the cheapest printing/best deals at the moment). This way you don’t have to fuss with the photo printing program’s editing tools.
Although there are some limits to the organizing features, I find it satisfactory for my needs (and I have over 30,000 photos).
I third ACDSee for organization.
We use Photoshop for editing. One of the best features of Photoshop is that you can set up a macro to do repetitive tasks (such as rotate, crop to a standard size, change dpi, and then save).
Personally, I can’t stand the GIMP, which I only use at the my day job, because my company is too poor to buy me Photoshop. GIMP, imo, is hard to use, although I imagine it would be easier for someone with no experience with Photoshop.
Picasa, Picasa, Picasa. UNless you’re looking for fancy-schmancy editing software, Picasa organizes all of your photos and…it’s free.
Did I mention that it’s free?
I’ve had a lot of success with Faststone Image Viewer. It’s a lot like ACDSee but less likely to crash (at least on my computer). It’s completely free as well.
Paintshop Pro is a great piece of software that I’ve used for years now. I use it to create my own graphics for my web site, tweak photos, etc. It’s very user-friendly and the newest version from Corel apparently comes with photo organizing software as well. It’s very reasonably priced (you can get it for around $89). I believe you can download free trial software from http://www.jasc.com
For organizing I’ve long used and enjoyed BreezeBrowser. I find it more common-sense in some ways than Picasa. But they charge you for updates, which has finally gotten to be too much for me, so I’m using Picasa more these days. I still have moments, though, when I’m waiting for Picasa to scan a new set of photos, or want a clearer file structure, and end up going back to BreezeBrowser.
I Nth Picasa as an organizer. For sharing (which is the whole point, really, right?), you’ll be synced to Picasa Web Albums, and I believe there’s also a Picasa-to-Facebook uploader.
A really neat tool is Picnik (www.picnik.com), a web-based photo editor that ties into Picasa, Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, Webshots, and your computer. Picnik can pull pics from your online accounts or local drive, edit them in the browser, then save them back to any or all of those locations. This is handy if you forgot to edit pics before uploading them to an online account. Editing features include auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, sharpen, exposure, color, red-eye, and adding text and shapes. There are free and premium versions.