On Thursday May 19th, Chris B-J took a look at Microsoft Photos, Google photos and two “retired” pieces of image management software, Picasa and Microsoft ICE.
Picasa can still be downloaded and installed, although Google is no longer developing it. https://filehippo.com/download_picasa/?ex=BB-2350.1
The same goes for Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor – used for creating panoramas: https://www.downloadcrew.com/article/10556/microsoft_image_composite_editor_64-bit
Both are still popular, despite being “retired”!
We noted that Microsoft photos displays image thumbnails in date order (newest first) or recently added, and provides filters, tonal adjustments and editing tools. Once an image has been edited you are encouraged to “save a copy” – so you have two versions of the same image file on disk. This is in contrast to Picasa, which displays image thumbnails according to the folders they are stored in. Filters, adjustments and editing tools are provided, but you don’t save the file after it has been edited. The image file remains as it was and Picasa “remembers” the edits you made, some or all of which can be reversed. This philosophy of reversible edits has been carried forward into Google photos.
To save edited versions of photos in Picasa, select the photos you want and then “Export picture to a folder” You can choose original size or smaller or more compressed. Chris demonstrated a slideshow video she had made for Friends of the Museum using Picasa. This featured text, captions and collages all made with Picasa: https://youtu.be/R5jgjf-mH5Y
Chris had forgotten to mention that its also easy to add captions to photos in Picasa. !
Google Photos is a cloud service. To add photos, sync them automatically from your smartphone or upload / drag and drop them from a PC. You can re-arrange the photos in albums, use the same photo in several albums and add text to an album. Note: Google photos now uses some of your 15GB allocated Google cloud space for documents (Drive), Gmail and Photos.
Chris demonstrated Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor (ICE) . This is (was) an advanced panoramic image stitcher created by the Microsoft Research Computational Photography Group. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the app creates a high-resolution panorama that seamlessly combines the original images. ICE can also create a panorama from a panning video, including stop-motion action overlaid on the background. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computational-photography-applications/image-composite-editor/
We discussed if it was better to scan or photograph old photos. Here’s an on-line discussion on the topic! https://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=121776.0
Chris Betterton-Jones, Knowledge junkie.