Being the budding photographer that I am, I’m constantly looking at the best way to organize, share, backup and just basically improve the workflow of my side-photography business.

That said, I can tell you that the two programs I use the most for most of these things are 1) Photoshop and 2) Picasa.

Photoshop is pretty self explanatory, I’ve been using it for over 15 years or so, and I don’t proclaim myself to be a professional by any standard – but I can certainly handle my way around it and know most of the functions quite well. I’m not going to talk about Photoshop today however, this post is going to be about Picasa.

I absolutely LOVE Picasa.

There are many reasons why I love Picasa, so I’m going to go into a few of them. The first reason that I love Picasa (of many) is the organization capabilities. It allows me to drag and drop and organize groups of pictures into collections and sets – very similar to what Flickr can do online, however this I can do on my desktop (much faster!). To give you an example of how I use it: let’s say I do a wedding photoshoot.. I will import all the pictures into a folder or set, let’s say ‘Wedding Shots – 12/02/2009′. Now these are untouched, and a lot of them are not going to be used. Over a cup of coffee usually the morning after – Liz and I will go through and pick out our favorites and ’star’ them, then once done. We’ll select all our starred photos and put these in a new folder called ‘Wedding Shots – 12/02-2009 – Favorites’. Once we have our favorites, then it’s time to touch them up. Once again we create a new folder called ‘Wedding Shots – 12/02/2009 – Final’ and that’s where we’d store the final touched up shots. The best part is that we’d keep them all in a collection called ‘Wedding Shots  - 12/02/2009′ or something like that so as to have all 3 versions organized in one spot. VERY convenient.

The second reason that I love Picasa is it’s ability to be programmed by other developers, almost like it’s “open source”. Someone out there created a ‘button’ for Picasa which adds a one click ability to launch the photos I choose for editing in Photoshop without ever leaving or launching it seperately. It’s a very small feature, but one which I find infinitely useful.

I’m going to keep going here – the integration and ability to open you favorite email editor and send photos via email (and also resize to your liking very easily) is a great feature even for rookies to use. Ha, just as I typed this I realized that my brother uses this feature all the time.. prooving my point!

The editing features of Picasa are ALSO great for rookies and quick touchups for experts too. Cropping and a number of simple edits are very handy.

Facial recognition! I can’t believe the software that’s on the backend of Picasa, but it actually recognizes faces that you have in the pictures and asks you to confirm if the system has it right or not. Very cool feature and something which I’m not sure how much use I’d get out of it, but cool none-the-less.

Auto-import. I can set this to sync up with any folder on my computer, and anytime a picture is put in that folder – it imports it into Picasa.

I think I’ll wrap up by highlighting what I find are the dealbreakers for me with regards to migrating from Flickr to PicasaWeb. First – upload speed… I’m not sure why, but for some reason the upload speeds to Flickr are horribly slow from any computer I try including my work connection. PicasaWeb is much faster to upload to. Second – integration with Picasa; this really can’t be understated as it’s very important. I can do a number of things with the integration, but the two ways I use it mostly is to share folders quickly (upload and share via online interface) and to sync. Sync is something I just started doing, but by ’syncing’ up the photos in a folder on my computer to the online PicasaWeb folder, I always have the latest version available online for me to work on or share. I’m going to find this incredibly useful once I go from the basic free version to more paid space.

Paid space is something that they just reduced which is what brought it to my attention. Here is how it breaks down in USD:

• 20 GB – $5/yr
• 80 GB – $20/yr
• 200 GB – $50/yr
• 400 GB – $100/yr
• 1 TB – $256/yr
• 2 TB – $512/yr
• 4 TB – $1024/yr
• 8 TB – $2048/yr
• 16 TB – $4096/yr

Now with Flickr (which wins in this comparison), I had unlimited space for $25 USD a year. However with all the features I just laid out, I don’t mind paying another $15 a year (200 gigs) to have an online storage solution tightly integrated with my favorite picture organizer. Of course, that 200 gigs is shared with Gmail.. but even still.. what am I at.. 2gigs or something for about 6 years of use of Gmail? I can’t see that being a problem.

I should also mention that I of course have to download all the files from Flickr to import to Picasa, which I’m in the process of doing right now. I’m using a java program called FlickrEdit which is downloading all my images (in their original form) to my USB drive as we speak. What’s great about this program is that it divides the pictures into the sets I had organized on Flickr. My action plan is to then sync those up with PicasaWeb and then organize the rest of my photos as well. The one drawback I have about PicasaWeb is the lack of ‘Collections’.. meaning that I can’t have a Collection called “Pets” and then have a number of Folders within that.. such as “Hunter and Bella”, “Maya”, “Family Pets”, etc.. at least I don’t think I can as of yet.. we’ll see.

Related posts:

1. Photography is hard work!
2. My first wedding photography gig is next week.. GAH!
3. Discovering The Power Of “Tags” in Lightroom
4. Of everything on your computer.. what do you want backed up?
5. If you see the google car.. HIDE!!