Are Your Holiday Photos Safe?

SaaS, Technology December 29th, 2007

The Holidays are typically the time for taking lots of family photos, so let me take this chance and remind you to keep your photos safe. For many of my readers safe increasingly means online, using photo storage/sharing services like Flickr, Zooomr, Smugmug, Picasa, and a zillion others.

Despite being a recognized cloud-computing fan, I am still keeping my photos locally though – and that requires a good back-up plan. ProtectMyPhotos has probably been the best photo backup & sync service – until now. Too bad it did not make it as a business: its closing doors on December 31st. That means you have 2 days to save your data locally and find an alternative.

My choice: simplification. I’ve already been using Mozy, a powerful yet non-intrusive online backup service for all non-photo data, so instead of looking for a photo-specific replacement, I’ve just reconfigured Mozy to include my photo directories in it’s backup routine. I lose some of the extra goodies ProtectMyPhotos offered, but at least got rid of some redundancy on my PC. Mozy has been reliably backing up my files for over a year now. The best part of it is that I don’t even notice it’s running. And now the shameless plug: if you’d like to give Mozy a try, use this registration link, we’ll both get an extra 250MB space. smile_wink

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Windows Desktop Search: Microsoft DOES Listen, After All

Personal Productivity, SaaS, Technology October 18th, 2007

I wrote about the Windows Desktop Search controversy several times: in a nutshell, under the auspices of installing Live Photo Gallery, Microsoft installed their Desktop Search product on XP systems, without asking for user permission or even bothering to notify users.

I’m glad to report proof that in this case Microsoft listened to their customers (or their own lawyers?):

Windows Live Photo Gallery no longer requires WDS (Windows Desktop Search) to be installed on XP! Again, we heard the grumblings loud and clear, and took action! Once you have installed the update via Microsoft Update and have build 1299.1010 install

There’s more, most importantly ability to easily upload to Flickr, which is no small feat, considering Flickr is now a Yahoo property. I’m wish Google followed suit and enabled Picasa to Flickr uploads. (Hello! Anybody there?)

My previous stories on the WDS controversy:

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Windows Live Photo Gallery: Poor Design or Shrewd Business Move?

Business, Personal Productivity, SaaS September 10th, 2007

I had Windows Live Photo Gallery installed on my computer – for about 15 minutes. Although I despise the aggressive, sneaky nature of Live Installer, which pollutes my PC with Windows Desktop Search without authorization, I still wanted to give it a try, primarily because my favorite Picasa is hopelessly single PC-minded. Surprisingly for Google, the champion of Web-based computing, Picasa is a major pain to use on multiple computers – so I thought I’d give the Microsoft product a try.

I am surprised at the mostly positive initial feedback about this feature-less product. Yes, it’s fast, yes, tagging is easy – but has anyone given any thought to why we’re tagging in the first place? Other than becoming data-input clerks, what can you do with Photo Gallery?

Picasa treats tags/labels as albums, and as any decent photo album would do, allows re-arranging the display order of individual photos by simple drag & drop. It also allows playing slideshows along with music, creating movies and a myriad of other options. Windows Live Photo Gallery allows you to play a slideshow in the pre-determined order – that’s all.

Well, almost. If you publish your photos to Live Spaces, you can create a basic slideshow rearranging the display order of your pictures. (I could not find this option, but let’s believe the Help text.) Now I’m really confused: as much as I am a Web-computing fan, photos (and video) are the one area I still prefer to use a local machine for, after all we’re manipulating fairly large files. So why would Microsoft create desktop photo manipulation software that allows extensive data input yet requires users to go online to enjoy their pictures?

Is this another case of thoughtless, poor design? Frankly, I doubt it. Perhaps Microsoft just showed their hands regarding the future Live business model. Charging for extra storage is nothing new, but I suspect we’ll see bandwidth-based pricing sooner or later. The PC-components of Live are just the hook to get us online, and pay for accessing our own data – and believe me, the bandwidth usage of a 20-minute slideshow will be quite significant. Surprised

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Picasa Photo Sync on Multiple Computers

Personal Productivity, Software, Technology November 19th, 2005

(Updated)
A while ago I wrote about Google’s otherwise excellent Picasa photo management program,  complaining that all your editing, labeling, captioning information gets lost when you move / copy your photos to another computer.

That’s because Picasa does not store such information in the photo files itself, rather uses a set of system files.  This is actually a good concept, you can experiment and safely revert back to the original –  as long as you view / process pics only within Picasa.   However, with thousands of photos, who would not want a backup?   That’s when the nightmare starts .. which files / directories should be copied?  Yes, I know … I should be on Flickr.. call me old-fashioned, I prefer to have a local copy of my images.

Well, unbelievably, Microsoft comes to help with this Google application:-)  Since they recently acquired Foldershare, it is now a freely dowloadable application.   Install it, then set up the following directories to be auto-synchronized between your computers:

  • My Pictures (or wherever the Picasa photos are) with all subdirectories.
  • C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2
  • C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2Abums

This will synchronize not only your photos, but all the edit / label ..etc information between any number of computers, over a local network or the Internet.  Btw, the program can be used to sync. any filetypes, not just your photos.

Update (8/25/09):  This is a 4-year old post.  Piacasa has had several new releases, Foldershare no longer exists (succeeded by Live Sync) and I have really no idea if this method still works.

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