Richard Freeman on 4 Aug 2010 04:29:40 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Digikam & Picasa, follow-up


On 08/04/2010 02:23 AM, JP Vossen wrote:
Digikam seems less slick and polished than Picasa, but probably more
technically capable. What you can do in Picasa is really easy, but...
Digikam seems to have tried really, really hard to hide the red-eye
feature. I had to Google for it, and even then, since it's been a couple
of days, I couldn't find it again. That's annoying.

We've been running Picasa at home for a while. I tend to use lightroom for the higher feature set, but Picasa has a much higher WAF. The thing I like about both of those products and digikam is that they all work without messing up your file collection. Picasa is pretty-much plug-and-play - point it at a directory tree and it indexes all your photos and keeps it up to date. Many other products seem to want to move around all your files, which makes it very hard to use competing products together. I really want my files stored primarily by directory, which always gives me an escape route if I change products, and also greatly simplifies backups (it is easy to keep track of what has and hasn't been copied to offsite DVD, and what still needs daily online backup protection).

Honestly, I don't think I'll be able to switch to any set of software that doesn't have an upload-to-Walmart feature. That really is the #1 WAF criteria for us right now. It is one thing Google has really done right.

Of course, the thing they really did wrong is their Linux support. They have a linux package, which is really just a rebundled wine combined with the windows version of the software. It is a REALLY messy solution, but it seems to be the Google way to be oblivious to package management. I still have on my to-do list removing swt from the android SDK so that it doesn't crash on a bunch of Gentoo user's systems (for whatever reason Google's bundled version breaks, and the OS's version is fine - the latter shouldn't be surprising since it was of course tested with the rest of the OS).

Rich
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