Back to our head-to-head, toe-to-toe fight between two of the best photo organizing software programs, Photoshop Elements 7 for Windows and Picasa. We had a pretty even matchup in part one, each program with different strengths.
- Prints and Creations: The winner is Photoshop Elements for its superior tools in this area. Picasa and Photoshop Elements both allow you to order prints of your photos from a variety of photo-printing sites. Photoshop Elements has much more robust tools within the software for organizing and creating photo products such as photo books, calendars, cards and t-shirt transfers. They also have many tools to help you print your photos at home in a variety of print formats. Elements also allows you to save your photobooks as a PDF, which is a nice format for saving and sharing.
- Emailing: We have a tie for this round. If you like cute stationary and nice PDF files, Elements is your winner. If you like social networking, Picasa may be your better choice. Both Picasa and Elements allow you to send photos by email, attached or embedded. Both allow you to compress photos to a smaller file size for easier emailing. With Picasa, you can create galleries and share the link with only those you invite. As for social networking, Facebook, SmugMug and Flickr all have Picasa plugins. With Photoshop Elements, you can place your photo into a variety of stationary themes, borders, and backgrounds of your choosing. You can also create a PDF slideshow of your pictures to email to your family and friends.
- Video: Pretty evenly matched in this area, for the basics. However, if you pay more and get the Adobe Elements package with the added video editing software, called Photoshop Premiere Elements, then Elements wins. Picasa does allow you to combine photos and videos into a movie of your own creation. You can then upload your video to YouTube with a click. Photoshop Elements alone allows gives you a lot of editing capabilities in creating slideshows set to music.
- Privacy: Photoshop Elements is for your desktop, so any files stored there are as secure as your computer. If you opt to use Photoshop.com for online storage, you can keep your albums private or public with a click on a lock button. You can also have friends with whom you share your albums. You can elect to have an email sent automatically to your friends whenever you update and album, which is a cool feature for those who are trying to keep friends and family updated with their latest photos. With Picasa Web Albums you can pick from three album visibility options: public, unlisted (hard to guess web address), and sign-in required to view.
- Extras – Photoshop Elements wins for coolest additional features:
Photoshop Elements:
a) Photomerge group shot – combine the best photo of each person in group shots into a single photo. Great when you can’t get the whole family smiling in a single photo.
b) Photomerge scene cleaner – Say you’ve taken a series of shots, but when your subjects looked their best, but a car was intruding in the background. You can wipe away that annoying car with this feature.
c) Map Your Memories – like Picasa, in Elements you can tag your pictures with a location and view them on a map.
d) Online Adobe Flash creations with great animated templates like maps.
e) Create PDF – easily create a PDF of your Photo book for an easy format to email or save.
f) Save for Web feature – Elements allows you to easily compress photos that you wish to upload to the web. This is a great feature in the full version of Photoshop, and it’s available in Elements now as well. Elements also allows you to convert files to many different photo formats. - Picasa:
a) Put your images on a map with Google Maps, and/or geotag them to Google Earth, My Places. You can set your Privacy settings so that others cannot see the location of your photos.
b) For blog or webpage use, you can create and embed a Flash slideshow.
c) You may have seen the commercials for Apple’s ILife about facial recognition. This just blew me away. I think we’ve surpassed the age of the Jetsons, in a lot of ways. Picasa also has facial recognition. When on the web version of Picasa, you can enable Name Tags and Picasa will try to find similar faces in your album. Note that when using naming tags, you can control who can see the name tags, especially important in the case of children.
In conclusion, Photoshop Elements 7 is the winner here with more advanced tools, great features and a great interface. So if you want to invest a bit of money and get more powerful editing and lots of cool features, then spend the money for Photoshop Elements and use it in combination with the online storage of Photoshop.com. However, if you just want the basics, free software, are a Google fan, and live for social networking, choose the Picasa photo-organizing software. You will have basic tools for photo organizing, editing and sharing.
Back to part one of our series on Photoshop Elements vs. Picasa.
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