Picasa vs. Proprietary software

BTM

My gf just got a Nikon D60

For capturing photos from the camera and general photo management would you recommend using Picasa or Nikon's proprietary software (currently, Nikon ViewNX 2 I think)?

I have Photoshop on my machine so not asking about image manipulation software at all.


Thanks

Brian

melekalikimaka

so are you looking for a cataloging program? have a look at lightroom.

Heebie

Picasa is proprietary software. It's written by Google programmers, and to the best of my knowledge isn't open-source. (although it isn't specific to any particular camera or brand.)

I prefer Lightroom for organising and basic functions. I find a lot of others a bit anaemic.

FoxT

I am a long-term Picasa user.

Pros of Picasa:
- Simple file management.
- It is free!
- 1-click publishing to Picasaweb
- crop/rotate/contrast/sharpen very simple to use, and work quite well.

Cons of Picasa
- Image editing capability is limited.
- No layers or curves for example
- Healing tool is very weak, works only with small blemishes
- can process RAW files but generally its image editing tools are not advanced enough for this to be any great advantage.
- Cannot add IPTC info to batches of photos, and tagging tools are a bit basic. (Big con for pros here)


I think Picasa is great if
- you are new to photography
- If, like me, you are not that interested in post-processing
- If you are happy doing your own file management & backups etc manually.


Lightroom, photoshop & other programs (ACDSee pro, Bibble, etc) - I have trialled some of these & I have found that, in general,
- Image processing functions are much better than Picasa
- Image tagging functions are superior to Picasa
-file management is more complex.

For me, Picasa pros outweigh the cons. I am planning to buy editing software in the next 12 months or so as I am now getting to the stage (after about 6 years or so) where I think my photography will benefit .

But it is a personal decision. Some people could be quite happy to, say, spend less time taking photos, and more time editing/processing them, and for those people I would expect that Picasa would be inadequate. Others, like me, like to experiment & take lots of photos, but prefer not to spend as much time editing/enhancing them.

This is longer than I thought it would be! Hope it is helpful.

-FoxT

BTM

Thanks for the replies

>>Picasa is proprietary software.

Yeah, bundled software would have been a better word to use.

>>have a look at lightroom

A bit early to be spending on software, but maybe she'll want something like this when she's been at it a year or two.



In the end, I stuck with Nikon Transfer for capturing the photos from the card as Picasa doesn't allow for custom renaming based on EXIF data.

Skipped Nikon ViewNX 2 and chose Picasa for organization/viewing/basic editing.

The facial recognition feature is great. That wasn't there the last time I tried Picasa!