Peter's Blog

Picasa can import pictures from cameras. It can hook into the windows XP WIA stuff (see here). In fact, as well as my Canon Powershot S1 it can also handle the K750i phone. There is only one problem I found with the way it imports: I could not see how to get it to delete the pictures from the camera once it had imported them. This is actually a bit of a pain as I have to delete them either through the camera (Canon) or file manager/salamander (K750i). Paintshop Photo Album has a nice checkbox for me to tick during the import process. Also PSPA automatically dumps the files in a directory named after the import date. Picasa prompts you for a name. I'm happy to file them by import date and organise them with labels.

Speaking of Paintshop Photo Album, they have bought out a new version but are charging for the upgrade. I don't think I'll bother to upgrade it, I'll wait paitently for picasa to evolve.

My favourite Photo Album software, Picasa now supports my favourite online printing service, Photobox. This means I can upload from Picasa directly to Photobox where I currently have 400M of storage available. Every time I order more prints I get 50M more storage.

I would happily abandon Jasc Paintshop Photo Album but it still provides two useful functions for me:

• it is the default application for importing images from my camera. Maybe picasa can do this, I haven't tried, another job for my todo list.
• PSPA supports drag and drop of pictures to other applications like a file manager. This way I can use it with the flickr uploader. With picasa you cannot drag and drop outside the application, a flaw in my opinion. As picasa is owned by google and flickr is owned by yahoo I cannot see flickr support in picasa coming any time soon.

I use the photobox storage as a backup for personal photos and flickr to show off pictures of my daughter.

I bought a copy of Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album online. It's a decent enought program and using Paint Shop Pro has made me a fan of their software. I have tried Picasa for organising my photo's and it is free and very flashy looking but I found it to be too restrictive, it's like a lot of google stuff in assuming you are a moron and that configuration options will confuse you. It hides grubby details like where on the disk it has put your pictures because you are too dim to understand the concept of files and directories.

Things I like about it:

• Adjust Wizard: shows you your photo and previews of what it will look like after various enhancements. Go through, accepting the previews you like.
• Easy to use Redeye correction. The Paint-Shop Pro redeye is very powerful but fiddly: you have to figure out the exact colour of someone's eyes, size of pupil, stuff like that. I use an old Nikon Coolpix 3000 camera which often produces redeye.
• Organises and nags you into making backups. Not a bad thing for irreplacable family photo's.
• Can quickly find photo's, rotate portraits etc, and quickly drop into PSP if a photo needs advanced editing.

However, after purchasing, attempting to get my licence key gives me the following error:

Internet Connection Failure

The product you are attempting to run is unable to connect to the Internet to
obtain a license key. You may not be able to run this program fully until a
connection is made.

Please check that you are connected to the Internet. If you have a connection
already, please check that your firewall settings will allow this software
program access to our servers.

Error code: -1

I've been trying this for three days now. I sent a message their customer service two days ago and have had no response. I tried turning off the Windows firewall but this made no difference and their online FAQ does not mention any specific ports that should not be blocked. The key retrieval thing asks for a password that I entered when I bought the software. I'm pretty sure I'm putting the right password in but their system does not give the option of emailing me a reminder.

Most registration systems I have used email you a key that you enter into the software. It looks like Jasc are using some outfit called Digital River for their software licensing and a system that downloads the key for you. It would save you a small amount of hastle except it is broken. I've had hastles at work with Pro/E CAD software licensing (Macromedia Lice) and when trying to add reliable dongle support to software.

Open Source software has another subtle advantage: a flaky copy protection scheme won't break it.

Blogging has a less subtle advantage: you can vent about something to hundreds of millions of potential customers. My Iotech diatribe got a response from their web master who was doing some market research using google.