According to TechCrunch a version of Picasa for Apple Macs will be coming along later:

I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year.

This is great news, one of the applications I miss from the PC is Picasa. I had really gotten into the workflow and nothing I have found since works the same way. While iPhoto and Aperture are well loved by many, and I have Photoshop Elements which kinda does the job, Picasa was what I had gotten used to.

And it is free, which shouldn’t be overlooked!

You might say I am looking forward to this. Let’s hope they do a good job integrating into the mac experience rather than just port over a subset of the functionality.

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Thomas Hawk has reported that Flickr has rethought the cap on Flickr contacts. Now reciprocal contacts will not be counted towards the limit, allowing people to amass larger numbers of contacts.

More info at Thomas’ blog post.

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A definition: “Light painting is a technique in which light sources are projected or “painted” in selective areas during the camera exposure. All work is done in camera, no computer manipulation occurs. Exposures can range from 20 seconds upwards to an entire evening to achieve.”

Damian and I had a go at this last year and it is a lot of fun. Hop over to the project page for more info on how to take part.

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First of all to refresh your memory, here is how it differs from Flickr and right off the bat my main gripe with it

Unlike Flickr which has monthly upload restrictions, Picasa Web Albums are restricted by total volume. You can purchase additional space at $25 a year.

In the world of DSLRs and my usage habits, 250mb is not going to take me long at all to fill up. You will have to work out which makes most sense to you. Now that is out of the way, the good news!

When you first click through from your invitation you are asked to download the new beta of Picasa, the desktop application part of the pairing. The previous version of the software was, although not Photoshop by any means, all many amateur digital photographers would ever need including all the basics for workflow including even RAW compatibility. This version has only minor tweaks but just the fact that it is already so feature-rich and now you can upload to the web direct from Picasa, plus the fact this is free software, well it is pretty compelling.

After installing Picasa rattles through your machine looking for images to catalogue. Also you can import any folders you have in other locations such as external drives. 99% of the time it is happy to just get on with this in the background but I have had it lock up once or twice.

Arranging your library couldn’t be easier, it is even possible to hide images you don’t like rather than delete. You can favourite images as you navigate for later export or for dragging into an album. Once you have an album the way you like it you can then upload as a web album.

Unlike Flickr where sets are given cryptic urls, here they have names based on the title you gave it. Viewing the album is much like Flickr, having slide show or next/prev features but a nice addition is three thumbnail viewing sizes and the option to download a whole album. Bizarrely for a Google subsidiary they are not big on search and neither is there tagging, they do have RSS feeds however.

I could not find much evidence of community other than the ability to favourite other users, how you are supposed to find these other users I will have to work out.

Verdict

It’s a good start and is probably all anyone who has never seen Flickr would need but I am afraid the capacity restriction and lack of community gives Flickr the edge for me. Well worth taking for a spin though and definitely one to watch …

Take a look at my test account here at http://picasaweb.google.com/chris.garrett/
flickr, picasa, google, web, albums, photo, sharing, community, photography, news

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The rest of the site is all about cell phones, bizarre! Other than that it all makes sense and is pretty darned easy to use. You start by selecting your image source, choosing between uploading, entering a url or searching.

Most people are going to look to the simple crop, resize, rotate options, maybe sharpening. Having said that it is fun to work through the quite considerable list of effects and distortion choices.

When you are finished you can hit save to download to your machine. There is also a “share it” option which I presume allows you to store your image online.

online, photo, editing

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Infringing Upon Freedom at After Hours with Sami Khan

So Calgarians, especially brown Calgarians, be warned, if you take pictures in the transit system you may be taken to the side by some policemen and questioned

With the paranoid times we live in I guess this will happen more and more, either legitimately for security reasons or as an excuse to hassle innocent citizens in cases where the individual likes to abuse their authority. I don’t think there is any way to prove which this case was one way or the other.

Technorati Tags: calgary, canada, photography, law, digital, camera, dslr

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10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris

Every hour, 10×10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10×10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

Technorati Tags: news, photography, journalism, photojournalism, bbc, rss

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