Picasa is Not a Substitute for Organizing your Photos

This Good Boot was to be Day 5 of helping your adopted novice become computer literate.

However, because I received so many e-mails last week questioning why I suggested when teaching a novice how to organize their My Pictures or Picture folder you shouldn’t begin their photo organization adventure with cataloging software such as Picasa and Photoshop Elements, I decided to substitute an explanation of why I made this suggestion.

Let’s say your favorite catalogue is Brookstone. When you receive their catalogue their products are displayed in an organized ‘by type’ presentation. A presentation determined by Brookstone’s marketing department. But if you were to visit their warehouse their products would not be organized and displayed as they are in their catalogue. In fact, they might be stored throughout a single big box warehouse.

If your adopted novice installs a photo cataloging software program before they physically sort their photos into relevant sub folders of Picture and My Pictures, the program will simply present all their photos in one mass presentation (like Brookstone’s warehouse). Although they’ll be able to organize and catalogue the mass presentation into relevant albums and folders, there’s a catch.

Like Brookstone’s catalog, the catalogues they create are unique to and can be viewed only by the cataloging program that created them. Their photos will remain as they were, unorganized in their My Pictures or Pictures folder.

Should they change cataloguing software or have to reinstall their software, they’ll have to recreate their catalogues from scratch.

I’m in no way insinuating they shouldn’t use Picasa or Photoshop Elements to create photo catalogues. But encourage them to do so only after they organize their photos in Pictures or My Pictures.

A heads up. A while back I suggested all XP and Vista Good Booters should consider installing Secunia PSI. A program that "automatically" patches your software with the latest security releases by the software vendor. It’s an amazing program and it’s "free".

Today I’m pleading with you to install it. Go to: (https: //psi. secunia. com/) and check it out!
In the past 13 weeks it has provided my system with 273 patches and notified me of 3 insecure programs I must update and 1 program that’s reached end of life (no longer supported).

Note: On each boot, Vista users must authorize Windows to execute the program by clicking on "Run Blocked Program". But this in no way means the program is a threat.

Here’s wishing you a Good Boot,