Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Recently I’ve gathered in one place–on a single hard drive–a copy of nearly every digital photo I’ve ever taken.

Back in December, while home in Alabama for Christmas, I discovered Picasa–free software from Google that lets you "instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC."

Picasa is a really helpful and easy-to-use software package. I have installed it on my Sony U, on my mother’s computer, on my x-wife’s computer and on this Toshiba laptop.

The combination of Picasa’s photo management features and the 100 GB hard drive on my new Toshiba prompted my big photo consolidation effort. I gathered photos from assorted backup CDs and from the hard drives of at least five different computers (my Sony U (bought 12/2004), the NEC Tablet (bought 10/2004), my second larger Sony Vaio (bought 8/2002) and my original small Sony Vaio (bought 08/2000). 

Now there are 10,323 files that begin with "DSCN" on the Toshiba. That’s the prefix used by my first two digital cameras, both Nikon Coolpix models. There are 4,386 files on my Toshiba that begin with "IMGP." That’s the prefix used by the Pentax S5i digital camera that I bought in January.

Picasa is now in version 2.0. It is well integrated with Blogger through another product called Hello. You can hit a button within Picasa and within seconds post a photo to your blog. Picasa also makes it incredibly easy to email  photos to others.

Picasa does not, alas, work with TypePad. I can keep up with my
photos in Picasa and use Picasa to edit them, but there is no button
within Picasa to then publish the photo to a TypePad-created blog.
Instead I have to know where the photo is on my hard drive, click
"insert image" from within TypePad and point to the location of the image file.

That’s how I got the above  Picasa screen shot here. I captured the
image with SnagIt, saved it to my hard drive, then inserted it here
thorugh the "insert image" command within TypePad. No Picasa steps were involved. However,
I will probably use Picasa to keep up with the image and others I post
here.