The (new) Picasa/SmugMug Thread

System

So, I'm the new guy, relatively -- I got my test 8x10 Wednesday, in about 5 days USPS 1st, and I'll be dropping pro coin tomorrow or Monday -- and since I've been a Picasa guy for almost as long as I've had my E-10, clearly it's in my best interest to use it with Smug as well.

Theoretically.

Alas, the difference between theory and practice is much greater in practice than in theory (a quote which appears actually to be attributed to me on the Internet, oddly, though I'm pretty sure I stole it from somewhere else...).

So, as I go down my road of trying to get Picasa to play nice with SmugMug, I'm going to document my travails here, and I invite everyone else stupid enough to do this to join me. :-)

Out of the gate, I see three major problems:

• To take advantage of proof-and-upload, I need to upload at full resolution, but reduced quality. Picasa's export function seems, when I choose those settings, to rescale *some* of my pictures to a lower quality setting (300-400KB instead of the 2.3-3MB I get at 100% quality), but not all, and it doesn't seem to have any bearing on which pictures were edited and which were not.
• Additionally, there's no reliable way to get sequencing out of Picasa. I don't want to have it rename the files (which it will do), for the (hopefully) obvious reasons, but in addition to re-compressing files apparently at random, it *re-timestamps* them apparently at random, as well. I can use jhead to pull the EXIF timestamps out and touch(1) the files, but that's not really what I'm looking for. If it would at least reliably re-timestamp *all* of them, it would probably be good enough.
• There is a third problem, but I can't remember it just now.
• Bruce.

So, if anyone has solutions, suggestions, ameliorations, other problems, or the personal email of the product line manager for Picasa at Google, chime right on in here, mmm'kay? :-)

cmason

I hear you imageinc. I am a fan of Picasa, but have abandoned it as a serious tool. Given that you are worrying about EXIF and timestamps, I would suggest you consider the same. By they way, I gave up on Picasa when I found it overwriting many EXIF attributes with Picasa-centric tags. Must be some reason for that, since EXIF in general isnt used within Picasa.

Picasa is a nice tool for most everyone, and provides some really nice photo 'fixing' features, but it is really targeted at the basic P&S set. Its organization features appear very very nice, until you try to create shoots, or move/copy photos around, then it starts to get confusing. Overall, it is powerful, but not a serious tool.

My guess is that writing a product manager at Google would be fruitless, because it is quite clear that they are not pursuing serious amateurs but more everyday photo taking. Offering up their own online photo viewing suggests this angle.

I would suggest you look at other solutions more suited to what you need...the Adobe Lightroom beta is an interesting place to start. Others will suggest iMatch and perhaps even Bridge within Adobe Photoshop.

Good Luck!

System

I appreciate your thoughts, cmason, but while I am having problems, I don't seem to be having some of the problems you did...

My comments concern v2.6.0, build 35,97 (and don't get me started on why a build number leaked into a production release...)

cmason wrote:

I hear you imageinc. I am a fan of Picasa, but have abandoned it as a serious tool. Given that you are worrying about EXIF and timestamps, I would suggest you consider the same. By they way, I gave up on Picasa when I found it overwriting many EXIF attributes with Picasa-centric tags. Must be some reason for that, since EXIF in general isnt used within Picasa.

"Used"? I dunno; it displays it on the Propellor-beanie popup along with the color histogram, and I always seems to get it right. It passes it through completely as well: even images I resize -- requiring recompression -- show up at Smug with the proper and complete EXIF info.

cmason wrote:

Picasa is a nice tool for most everyone, and provides some really nice photo 'fixing' features, but it is really targeted at the basic P&S set. Its organization features appear very very nice, until you try to create shoots, or move/copy photos around, then it starts to get confusing. Overall, it is powerful, but not a serious tool.

I'm not sure what you mean by that: I don't have any problems at all with the label (and now album) features for organizing pictures -- I put all my raw shooting into date-named folders and use Albums for everything. The only problem I *do* have is that there's no reasonable way to interact that with Smug, since, y'know, physical galleries.

cmason wrote:

I would suggest you look at other solutions more suited to what you need...the Adobe Lightroom beta is an interesting place to start. Others will suggest iMatch and perhaps even Bridge within Adobe Photoshop.

Good Luck!

I may need it, I guess. But, flipside, not *all* Smug users are pros, and the problems still seem worth fixing. Alas, on several points (relating mostly to organizing), I feel that Picasa is the end which has the proper architecture, and convincing Onethumb et al to change wouldn't be easy, either.

System

Folo: As it happens, Picasa, when it Exports as Web Page, one of the templated formats is XML... which puts out the exported pictures, and and XML file that *contains the filenames in sequenced order*.

Andy, et al: any chance of implementing a "resequencing" feature that uploads just that XML file and re-positions the images in the gallery to match?

Now that I'm awake, I've thought to upload it to Somewhere Else

I note that it also contains the Album/Gallery caption, and I think also the photo captions, though those are already in the IPTC data, so far as I know.

System

Well, crap. I went off and found something useful to add to this thread, so as not to be doing a gratuitous bump... and edited it in. Which leaves the thead submerged. I tried...

System

Hopefully the rush from the new rollout has worn off a bit...

Andy? Don? Could I at least get an official go-to-hell on this one? :-) I'll write the scripting myself, if you like; it couldn't be more than a couple hours work if the storage architecture is sufficiently native looking...

System

Well, clearly, said rush has worn off, since everyone's answering everyone else's questions.

So, since I took it on faith that I'd at least *be able to get an answer* to this question I posted while I was still in my trial period, and upped the $150 for the year..



Could I get *some* sort of reply to this inquiry here 'bout XML and resequencing, Andy? Don? Barb?

ANYONE?

The price of having staff participate in open customer forums is that doing it properly is a *bitch*. This is not doing it properly.

jfriend

Will any of these work?

imageinc wrote:

• Additionally, there's no reliable way to get sequencing out of Picasa. I don't want to have it rename the files (which it will do), for the (hopefully) obvious reasons, but in addition to re-compressing files apparently at random, it *re-timestamps* them apparently at random, as well. I can use jhead to pull the EXIF timestamps out and touch(1) the files, but that's not really what I'm looking for. If it would at least reliably re-timestamp *all* of them, it would probably be good enough.

What order to you want your shots in?

Are you aware that if you go into customize gallery, you can select a sort order for the gallery. It offers you the following options:

• Position (manually specified order in Smugmug)
• Caption (sort alphabetically by caption)
• Filename (sort alphabetically by filename)
• Date uploaded (the order you uploaded it)
• Date modified (if available in the EXIF)
• Data taken (if available in the EXIF)

Andy

imageinc wrote:

Could I get *some* sort of reply to this inquiry here 'bout XML and resequencing, Andy? Don? Barb?

ANYONE?

The price of having staff participate in open customer forums is that doing it properly is a *bitch*. This is not doing it properly.

I've answered a zillion questions - I'm terribly sorry I haven't answered yours yet. Allow me to research this.

Andy

imageinc wrote:

Could I get *some* sort of reply to this inquiry here 'bout XML and resequencing, Andy? Don? Barb?

ANYONE?

The price of having staff participate in open customer forums is that doing it properly is a *bitch*. This is not doing it properly.

I do not use Picasa, I'm sorry. The community answers will help. Try jfriend's posting just above.

I will try and seek out more picasa users, to see if they can provide some expertise.

BTW, in the future, please feel free to bump a thread, if we've missed replying, it'll get brought to my atttention. Also, you can write to our help desk, http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal ANY time and we provide near instant support, 365 days a year, nights, weekends, all major holidays - nearly round-the-clock, too

Sorry I'm not much more help right now.

System

Andy wrote:

I do not use Picasa, I'm sorry. The community answers will help. Try jfriend's posting just above.

I will try and seek out more picasa users, to see if they can provide some expertise.

BTW, in the future, please feel free to bump a thread, if we've missed replying, it'll get brought to my atttention. Also, you can write to our help desk, http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal ANY time and we provide near instant support, 365 days a year, nights, weekends, all major holidays - nearly round-the-clock, too

Sorry I'm not much more help right now.

Doo doo occurs. I *had* bumped it, twice. *And* linked it from the "hope for" thread.

In any event, the only possible way I could forsee it being implemented would be from inside -- the API doesn't expose filenames *or* positioning commands, does it?

To answer jfriend's question, "in the order I put them into in Picasa". :-)

Andy

imageinc wrote:

Doo doo occurs. I *had* bumped it, twice. *And* linked it from the "hope for" thread.

In any event, the only possible way I could forsee it being implemented would be from inside -- the API doesn't expose filenames *or* positioning commands, does it?

To answer jfriend's question, "in the order I put them into in Picasa". :-)

Hi, make a post in the hacks forum, this is a perfect app for the community to make a hack for, eh?

That's how lots of great apps get made

System

Done.

System

It appears that it might be possible to modify Rutt's sm_tool.py to parse the Picasa XML file and reposition the images; I'll be looking into it this week. I don't think I have a Python interpreter on the Windows side of my laptop at the moment, so I gotta do that first.

Otherwise; it's a cool looking tool -- is Rutt still around?

Andy

imageinc wrote:

Otherwise; it's a cool looking tool -- is Rutt still around?

Sure he is.