Do You Know Which Photo Organizing Software is Better for Your Needs?
In the ultimate showdown of two of the best photo organizing software programs available, we’ve done a side-by-side comparison of all of the important features in order to determine a winner.
In one corner, we have Google’s Picasa for the desktop and Picasa Web Albums, that work in conjunction with each other. In the other corner we have Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 7 for Windows, a robust photo organizing tools with many of the features of the award-winning Photoshop. Elements works in conjunction with Photoshop.com for online storage. Here’s our take on each of the features.
- Online storage Purely looking at online storage prices, Adobe offers you more for your money. The online companion to Photoshop Elements called Photoshop.com offers 2GB of free storage space, enough for 8,000 wallpaper size photos. You can get this membership without purchasing Photoshop Elements. Picasa offers 1GB of storage for free. If you need 10GB of storage (up to 7,000 photos), the prices are comparable at about $20/year between Picasa and Photoshop.com. At 40GB of storage, Photoshop.com is the winner at $39.99/year, as opposed to $75/year on Picasa. Photoshop.com has a 100GB storage limit. On Picasa, you can purchase up to 400GB of storage, a huge amount of space probably only needed by professional photographers.
- Price:Picasa is the winner here, if you just want the basics. You can’t beat its free price that includes1GB of storage. In order to get all of the features described in this article, you must pay the $139.99 price tag for Photoshop Elements. However, the basic membership to Photoshop.com is free and includes 2GB of storage.
- Mac vs. PC: The winner is Photoshop Elements (version 6 for Mac). Adobe products are big favorites of graphic and web designers who more often than not are on a Mac. Photoshop Elements works well on a Mac. On the other hand, the launch of Picasa for Mac was in January 2009, so it’s a newbie to in the Mac world. Picasa is supposed to work well with iPhoto for mac, but is missing some features in Picasa for Windows.
- Desktop organizing and sorting: Elements is the winner here, by a nose. The interface is nicer and it has a great tagging system that allows you to make cool “creations” with your photos. With Elements, you import photos and they are automatically stored by date. You can then easily tag photos by person, place or event.
- Editing The clear winner here is Photoshop Elements. If you want the best and most powerful photo editing tools in your photo organizing software, its the way to go. Elements, being in the Adobe family, has many of the same tools as one of the most powerful photo editing software, it’s big brother, Photoshop. The only drawback is that there is a learning curve for using the tools in Adobe Elements, although they do have one-step shortcuts. Picasa’s tools may not be as powerful, but it does have many editing tools that are sufficient for your average amateur photographer, including red-eye, cropping and one-click fixes for color and contrast. Note that the free Basic membership to Photoshop.com also comes with photo editing tools, more comparable to Picasa’s tools.
Stay tuned for our Photoshop Elements vs. Picasa, Part 2, which includes Sharing, Printing, Videos, Extras and our conclusion.
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Questions:
Not clear what size photo is a “wallpaper size” — is this your reference to the standard 4×6?
I thought Photoshop Elements for Windows is at version 7 and for the Mac it’s version 6?
Thanks for your comment, Carl. Yes, I believe Photoshop Elements for Windows is at version 7 and for Mac it’s version 6. The free storage space of 2GB (2,048MB or 2,097,152KB) holds about 8,000 photos of 262KB each. It really depends on what resolution your camera is set for and whether or not you compress the photos. My full-size photos tend to be closer to 2.5 MB each as they come from my camera. Therefore, the free storage of 2KB would be enough for 800 photos. For printing, I do like to keep them at this resolution. If I plan to put something on the web, I use the “Save for Web” feature in Photoshop and compress my photos to 50KB or under so they download faster. The 2GB of free storage would allow for about 41,000 photos of this size.