What is a Picasa alternative for posting to a website?

Question

My love/hate relationship with Picasa just permanently tipped to hate I'm afraid. For no reason I can discern Picasa decided I didn't really mean to add yesterday's photos to an album and right in front of my eyes they disappeared. I don't want to waste any more time with Quirky Picasa.

What PC / web software is good for posting reduced-size (1600 pixels max width), tagged pix to the web? Cameras include iPhone (jpeg) and Canon DSLRs (jpeg & raw). The site's goals include:

• Family & friends should be able to see the photos I've added since their last visit, as well as show a guest the photos tagged "Aunt Gurty".
• People should be able to contact me to use photos for commercial purposes.

Answer

Lightroom is a great app for organisation and workflow and from version 3 you can set up your Flickr, Smugmug/Facebook, whatever sharing accounts, and post directly from within Lightroom once you're happy with your photo :-)

EDIT: Lightroom features website -- has a little video on there of publishing photos to external service. Flickr would also give you your ability to restrict access and use tags as you requested.

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Why does Picasa open RAW images correctly then desaturate them?

Question

I have an Olympus E-PL2 and am taking photos in raw. I have the codec downloaded from Olympus, so I can view the photo with Picasa in Windows, and it looks fine but a few seconds after loading the image, it goes and does something in which it looks like it desaturates the whole photo. What is going on? I know there are many posts asking 'what is a good raw viewer' but I'm looking more for a solution for Picasa if possible since I use it for all my photo management.

Answer

Sorry but you are confused. Picasa first shows you the JPEG preview that is embedded in RAW files.

It then loads the RAW data and lets it be converted by the codec. What you see then is the RAW file with default convertion.

In order to get something good from a RAW file, you have to work at it. IIRC there are questions here regarding matching the JPEG conversion and about why RAW files do not look so good by default.

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How can you write/convert Picasa's People tags to the EXIF data?

Question

I use Lightroom for my workflow, and I tag photos with people's names so that I can find them faster.

Since Lightroom doesn't have the "Faces" feature, I want to use Picasa's People feature for this purpose, but I don't want to work constantly with both of them. I'd rather use Picasa to tag the photos with the name tags every time I import new photos, and come back to Lightroom for the rest.

I couldn't find a way to make Picasa actually "tag" the photos (in the EXIF) with the people's names. Is there any plugin / script / ... that can make this happen?

Answer

Picasa stores faces information in the .picasa.ini files:

[test.jpg]
faces=rect64(1eb1929f885e),15441a598f9f1866
backuphash=29866

The id numbers can be found in the contacts.xml file which stores all the contacts of your pictures:

<contact id="15441a598f9f1866" 
  name="Test Test" 
  display="Test" 
  modified_time="2010-05-13T17:19:46+01:00" 
  sync_enabled="0"/>

Several programs can read these files and modify the EXIF accordingly. For instance:

• faceextract.pl ( command line perl script )
• AvPicFaceXMPTagger (GUI)

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What are the differences between Picasa and Lightroom, other than price?

Question

I've heard about Adobe Lightroom before, but never really understood what's so great about it, or why you'd pay for it when you can get Picasa for free.

I know Lightroom probably has more sophisticated editing options, but what are they, exactly, and how to do they compare to Picasa? Why would you use one over the other? Is Lightroom better for streamlining editing workflow, but Picasa is better for organizing & tagging photos? And would you ever use both programs?

Basically, what are the differences between Picasa and Lightroom?

Answer

There are several features that I think are just awesome in one or the other. Depending on your needs, one of these features will make you (usually + some other things) go towards Picasa or Lightroom.

Lightroom:

• Integration with other Adobe product (Photoshop, InDesign, etc)
• More sophistication in editing (somewhere in between Picasa & Photoshop)
  • Color correction, CA correction
  • NR & sharpening
  • Exposure & WB adjustments
• Can do batch processing

Picasa:

• Arguably faster (much faster for me)
• Integration with Google product (Blogger, etc)
• Simpler editing tools

So, if your workflow deals with more Photoshop, other Adobe stuff, Lightroom is the way to go. If you need more editing tools but don't want Photoshop, go Lightroom. Other than that, like me, I went for Picasa.

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