Saturday, May 19, 2007
I think I am in love
I am swooning. I am giddy. I am in love with Google's free photo-editing software, Picasa. Oh Picasa. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Have you ever had one of those experiences where you suddenly realize you have been doing things the hard way for years and years and years, and all of a sudden you realize that it doesn't have to be that painful? I have been a loyal user of Yahoo Photos for several years now. It was cool at first because it was one of the only tools around (at the time I started doing this sort of thing, in the Pleistocene ages of the Internet). It never got much better to use, it's hard to get it to do what I want, and I got cranky with it sometimes, but I didn't know any better.
Now I do. Picasa, Picasa. Oh my goodness, Picasa. Those Google folks have done it again. Picasa allows me to see all the photos on my hard drive. It allows me to crop them, zoom in, resize them with a minimal number of clicks. It allows me to preview my changes before I finalize them. It will email them for me (resizing them automatically first). Hell, it will even blog them for me. (This particular photo is a cropped and zoomed bird butt that I need to identify when I get back to where my bird books are.)
I love my new toy, and I don't want to be greedy, but you know one thing that would be really cool for those of us who are blunderingly incompetent birders? Listen up, Sergei and Larry and the rest of you Googlers. I want to be able to upload my unidentified bird photos and have you guys compare them to a database of bird photos that have been uploaded by other birders (hopefully ones more competent than myself). Then the database could compare the features of the bird in my photo to the photos it has, and give me some idea of what kind of bird I might have caught in my viewfinder. Instead of wikipedia, it could be called birdopedia. Dare I dream?!!!?
The only thing cooler than that would be having some sort of Star Trek-ian tricorder thingie that you could point at whatever you are trying to identify (bird, tree, unidentified animal scat, etc) and it could tell you what it is that you're looking for. I have been dreaming about this for years also. I call it my "Naturalist in a Box" daydream.
Anyway, just wanted to say THANK YOU to Google for being so completely and utterly wonderful. Excuse me, I must go bask in the glow of Picasa some more.
¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 8:47 PM 
I am swooning. I am giddy. I am in love with Google's free photo-editing software, Picasa. Oh Picasa. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Have you ever had one of those experiences where you suddenly realize you have been doing things the hard way for years and years and years, and all of a sudden you realize that it doesn't have to be that painful? I have been a loyal user of Yahoo Photos for several years now. It was cool at first because it was one of the only tools around (at the time I started doing this sort of thing, in the Pleistocene ages of the Internet). It never got much better to use, it's hard to get it to do what I want, and I got cranky with it sometimes, but I didn't know any better.
Now I do. Picasa, Picasa. Oh my goodness, Picasa. Those Google folks have done it again. Picasa allows me to see all the photos on my hard drive. It allows me to crop them, zoom in, resize them with a minimal number of clicks. It allows me to preview my changes before I finalize them. It will email them for me (resizing them automatically first). Hell, it will even blog them for me. (This particular photo is a cropped and zoomed bird butt that I need to identify when I get back to where my bird books are.)
I love my new toy, and I don't want to be greedy, but you know one thing that would be really cool for those of us who are blunderingly incompetent birders? Listen up, Sergei and Larry and the rest of you Googlers. I want to be able to upload my unidentified bird photos and have you guys compare them to a database of bird photos that have been uploaded by other birders (hopefully ones more competent than myself). Then the database could compare the features of the bird in my photo to the photos it has, and give me some idea of what kind of bird I might have caught in my viewfinder. Instead of wikipedia, it could be called birdopedia. Dare I dream?!!!?
The only thing cooler than that would be having some sort of Star Trek-ian tricorder thingie that you could point at whatever you are trying to identify (bird, tree, unidentified animal scat, etc) and it could tell you what it is that you're looking for. I have been dreaming about this for years also. I call it my "Naturalist in a Box" daydream.
Anyway, just wanted to say THANK YOU to Google for being so completely and utterly wonderful. Excuse me, I must go bask in the glow of Picasa some more.
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Wow you know I looked at Picassa once a long time ago and I think I even downloaded it but then I never really did anything with it - if YOU love it then I will re-check-it-out!
I am feeling the way about Bloglines Playlists as you are feeling about this and was about to do a post on it today! Great minds think alike!
And your idea for the bird-matching-service sounds great! ;-)
:-)
Amy
I am feeling the way about Bloglines Playlists as you are feeling about this and was about to do a post on it today! Great minds think alike!
And your idea for the bird-matching-service sounds great! ;-)
:-)
Amy
Picasa is definitely a force in the free photo editing world. I wrote an article on minimum requirements for selecting a free photo editing software package. Needless to say that Picasa met all of them and more.
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