With the digital cameras being omnipresent and as we get trigger happy with our cameras, what do we do with tons of pictures we end up with?
For a while I tried to create albums for every occasion and tried to keep track of it.. only to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of pictures and locating them when I needed it. That’s when I stumbled on to Google’s Picasa. Once you have it installed, as soon as you import pictures from your camera or download from web, it automatically locates it and organizes it! Picasa has relieved me of the burden to catalog and maintain the pictures. Plus, it has such an intuitive user interface that now I actually enjoy looking through my older pictures in a slideshow or by clicking!
It also has basic image editing features like removing those pesky red-eyes, adding effects, etc. You could also share your pictures through email or through its web interface called Picasa Web Albums. The best part about Picasa is its one-click upload feature! All you have to do is select all the pictures you want to upload and just click upload! You can make your web albums private or public and you can share your albums with your parents, friends or relatives right from the web interface!
You do need a GMail account for Picasa Web Albums.
So what is Flickr?
Don’t get me wrong, Picasa Web Albums is nice. But Flickr is mindblowing! While Flickr is great at online photo management, it just rocks when it comes to sharing!! There is a world of groups and communities and forums on Flickr now. You could spend hours even days looking at some amazing pictures taken by people like you and me.
One great feature is that you could tag your pictures and anyone looking for that tag would stumble across your picture. Say, you tag your pictures from your summer trip to the Florida Keys and you search for the tag
‘Florida Keys’ you can see the pictures others have taken there!! Anyone can leave comments or make your pictures their favorites and the list of things you could do with Flickr is too many to list here.
I hope this will get you intrigued to go check it out yourself. Thanks for stopping by and let me know if you enjoyed it.
For your viewing pleasure.. some pics from our Flickr collection!
I persoanlly did not like Picasa software for managing my photos. I simply did not understand where my photos are. I use Windows folders structure for cataloging my photos. It may not be as fancy looking as Picasa but I always know where I am.
As for Flickr I agree that it is great for a variety of communities you can find and join there. I do not see a problem with their free account limitations but if I need to I will be able to purchase a paid account later.
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Andrew, I hear you on how it could be a little confusing to use Picasa. It can’t beat your folder categories. But, the problem is a lot of folks aren’t (myself included) as organized and Picasa atleast does a default by date separation of pictures. But, admittedly I am leaning more towards Flickr lately as my DSL subscription with AT&T gives me a free PRO account. 😉
I’ve just started using flickr and it’s a real eye opener for me. A really useful tool with a vast community. Also useful for inspiration.
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This is the best advice I have ever read. I though I was organized until I read your tips and executed them. Thank you so much.
I’ve been browsing online more than 3 hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It is pretty worth enough for me. In my opinion, if all webmasters and bloggers made good content as you did, the web will be a lot more useful than ever before.