Contact me by clicking
on the mail box.Picasa is free software from Google. It will keep track and let you manage all the photos on your hard drive and do it quickly and elegantly. Set it up properly and it will find all the pictures you download, all the photos you've created copies of with other software. Move a picture from one directory to another? No problem for Picasa. It knows where it is within a second. Need to tweak them? Picasa can handle that. It's not the most impressive photo editor but it may well be all you will ever need.
Photos have extended attributes that travel with the file. Your camera inserts information about the photo within the file and you can also add your own personal information to you photo file. This can be either IPTC or XMP. To put it succinctly, those items such as keywords, location where the picture was taken, copyright information and others become part of the picture file and travel with it if you send it to someone. Given the right software you can also do some very sophisticated searches on these fields. A lot of the graphic software can now read these fields. Some programs can read and or write IPTC and others will read and or write XMP. PixVue reads and writes both. It's not a program you launch but, after the install, it adds a set of context menus to the appropriate files. All you need to do is right click on the file to see it in action. PixVue has two part. The one that lets you assign keywords and other information to the picture file and a gallery where, if you want to use it, you can create some incredibly sophisticated searches on many fields at the same time. Not only can you do these searches on the files on your hard drive but you can also include complete CDs or DVDs that contain archived photos.
I was sorry to see that PixVue is no longer being updated as of the beginning on 2007. I've searched Google for it but it appears that all the download sites that made it available were linking to the developer's site. So, I can't find a downloads site. If you want it drop me an e-mail and I will send it to you. If I have enough requests I'll upload it to my site and link to it. Apparently it does not work with that wonderful bling bling from Microsoft called Windows Vista.
I don't often pay for software since I believe that free is often be as good or better than pay software. PhotoBrush was registered and paid for well before the expiration of the free trial period was over. It took me two days to decide.
I had downloaded and tried out upward of a dozen pieces of photo editing software before finding PhotoBrush. Many of it was free but some of it was from big names like Adobe. Most of it, free and costly, did a fine job but for one who has been working with software for over twenty years, yet is a nullity when it comes to graphic stuff, this little program made life incredibly easy. You can download it and try it out but you will need to pay for it if you want to keep on using it.