BusinessWeek Online Pans Google's Picasa
posted by Thomas Hawk at 8:52 PM
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Sunday, November 13, 2005
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- Name: Thomas Hawk
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Thomas Hawk is a photographer and blogger in the SF Bay Area writing under the pen name Thomas Hawk. Professionally Thomas Hawk is an investment advisor in a non-technology related field and uses his pen name to separate his investment career and identity from his thoughts and opinions on new media and technology, both fields which neither he nor his firm advise or offer services for professionally. Additionally, Thomas Hawk is Evangelist and CEO for the photo sharing Site Zooomr. My statement as an artist is to outdo New York’s Little Angel Angelo Rizzuto, who between 1952 and 1966 documented New York City with over 60,000 photos. We all have but a short time on this earth. As slow as time can be it is also fast, swift, furious and mighty and then it’s over. Angelo Rizzuto is dead, Jack Kerouac is dead. John Lennon is dead. Andy Warhol is dead. Garry Winogrand is dead. Lee Friedlander isn't dead yet, but he probably will be at some point. When I'm not taking or processing pictures I'm mostly thinking about pictures. I'm trying to publish a library of 1,000,000 finished, processed photographs before I die. You can reach me at tom(at)thomashawk.com.
4 Comments:
What a lousy review.
For 99 % of my photos I only need to adjust the basic levels, contrast, crop and straighten. Please show me a piece of software better suitable.
For the rest 1 %, I have Photoshop.
And he doesn't mention the *real* weakness of Picasa: The organizer is weak compared what e.g. flickr can do. Tags? Searching? Calender?
I didn't offer any of my own commentary as I've never tried the service. I have photoshop and pretty much use it for everything. Although I do have to say that both Aqui Ali and SFBuckaroo (two flickr pals) have used it and speak highly of it.
It's a lousy review.
I've used Picasa extensively. It has some good features, particularly its batch-viewing and slide-show functionality, and its integration with Gmail, which makes it super-easy to email photos. (And Gmail is excellent for viewing photos, which with one click can be displayed on a single scrollable page.) Picasa's editing functions are rudimentary but very well-designed, and are adequate for most adjustments. You can always use Photoshop for more careful editing (I do).
But Picasa also has some bad features, notably its refusal to recognize users' directory hierarchies. Picasa sees only the lowest-level directories on your HD. So if you use, for example, a date-based directory hierarchy to organize your thousands of images, with high-level subdirectories named by date and bottom-level subdirectories named by function ("scans", "web", "prints", etc.) you are almost SOL. Not quite SOL, because you can -- manually, slowly -- create "Collections" that correspond to your preferred directory names, but this is a major flaw. I don't know if the developers designed Picasa this way out of hubris or because they are trying to conform to some Google-centric ideal of database portability, but it's a big problem either way. If you peruse the Picasa support forums you can find numerous agonized complaints about these issues.
I find Picasa useful mainly as a batch viewer to make initial selections and edits before doing serious editing in Photoshop, and as an emailer. I continue to use it despite its flaws because it is excellent within its limitations, and also because I think there's a good chance Google will eventually yield to criticism and modify the program to recognize user-generated directory hierarchies. I suggest trying Picasa for yourself to see if you like it.
Jonathan
Sorry, I didn't wanted to critize you, I meant to critize the review on Business Week...
And my point should have been: I like Picasa, except for lack of features to help me organize the photos. But it still is much better than Photoshop's Organizer. This piece of software from Adobe is awful and slow compared to Picasa (My 2 cents).
And is it Picasa fault, that it is unable to pentrate Business Weeks firewall?
(Sorry, I was a bit at rage at the review, I posted too fast... Damn, Picasa is *not* "glitchy")
This business review seems like: "Ok, I take a look for one hour at this software and then write a couple of words." Clearly not written by someone actually using the software. (Or any other software to organize his photos)
I like Photoshop, but for the basics, Picasa is much faster and better than Photoshop. I tried these "Auto-Correction" in Photoshop (don't know the correct translation - I have the German Photoshop version), but they are awful.
Yes, it could be better integrated with Flickr and co, but hey, it's free.
(And boy, this "Leave your comment" box by blogger.com is very small... Next time I need to write it in a text editor and paste it here)
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