Picasa and organizing?

[arimacias]

ok... so my dh got me a macbookpro for my 42nd birthday.YAY!
but here is my dilemma.
i am keeping all my prior digi stuff on my other macbook, but i want to make sure that i start out the right way on this one. i wasn't organizing at all before, except for putting my files in folders. i feel like i need something more detailed now.
SO....my question is does anyone use picasa to organize their digistuff?
and if so, any tips before i start? i already use picasa for my pics.
sooooo many new possibilities

[anke]

no tips from me. I tried using Picasa and did not like it for supplies. just not my cup of tea, I am waiting for ACDSee for Mac In the meantime I use finder and spotlight to find stuff...

[arimacias]

hmmmmmm...that's a thought. i would love to give acdsee a try. still need something to give me structure in the meantime

[lesvrolyk]

I used to use picassa, but upgraded to acdsee recently. I'm still trying to figure things out with that. But here's what I did with picassa...
I had separate folders just for previews. I'd put the previews there and then just look at those folders to see what I had. When I found something I wanted to use, I'd navigate to the folder with the content. My folder structure looked kinda like this.

Kits (contain the actual stuff)
Brushes
Elements
Papers
Templates
Kit Samples (just previews for easy viewing in picassa)
Brush Samples
Element Samples
Paper Samples
Template Samples

It worked well enough, but I wasn't able to find things in the big kits and couldn't sort at all.
Hope this helps you!

[elseepe]

I use Picasa and really like it for my digi supplies because it has great search capabilities even without a ton of tagging.

under the tools experimental category, there are two I use a lot. One is to create albums from tags (but your tag name must be all lower case for this to work). For example, my templates tag allows me to create an album to see all my templates, and as I tag new templates they automatically go into that album.

The second thing in that experimental category is search by color. Of course, the options for this are preset, and it isn't perfect, but it is good enough to keep me from tagging all my papers with color.

a thing to keep in mind when creating your tags. The search engine is good, so if you create a tag of "frame", and you search for "frame" it will find everything that has frame in the name, or layer name on a template, not just your elements tagged with "frame", so you might want to create unique tag names for those kinds of things.

You have to tell Picasa to look at .png files and small files.

I just recently had to replace my hard drive and was very pleased with Picasa. I did not back-up directly from Picasa. I had only backed up my folder structure. This kept all the picasa.ini files that are created and all my tags came back when I reloaded my new hard drive.

I have never tried using Picasa on multiple PCs, supposedly it doesn't really work well.

I use pretty broad categories for my tagging and it works well for me. I did take an on-line class for it that was geared to digi scrappers. It was helpful, but all the info is available in the Picasa manual.

Good luck with whichever way you go.

[Amy L]

Since ACDSee for Mac is taking awhile to come out haha, I use Picasa. I like it a lot. Elseepe is right about the search engine being good. It's a good idea to choose a catchall tag like "1-elements" for all your elements. Then you can add "frames" to your frames and "staples" to your staples without pulling up all the template layers and layout layers if you store .psd files.

I used to store everything in folders only without a tagging system and I do think this way is better.

[jenniferdraut]

I love the Picasa experiment "color" finder, thanks. I also figured out that you can add more terms after the "color:red" that comes up in the search box. I typed in "stitch" and it found all my red stitches! I attached a screen shot.

Originally Posted by elseepe

I use Picasa and really like it for my digi supplies because it has great search capabilities even without a ton of tagging.

under the tools experimental category, there are two I use a lot. One is to create albums from tags (but your tag name must be all lower case for this to work). For example, my templates tag allows me to create an album to see all my templates, and as I tag new templates they automatically go into that album.

The second thing in that experimental category is search by color. Of course, the options for this are preset, and it isn't perfect, but it is good enough to keep me from tagging all my papers with color.

a thing to keep in mind when creating your tags. The search engine is good, so if you create a tag of "frame", and you search for "frame" it will find everything that has frame in the name, or layer name on a template, not just your elements tagged with "frame", so you might want to create unique tag names for those kinds of things.

You have to tell Picasa to look at .png files and small files.

I just recently had to replace my hard drive and was very pleased with Picasa. I did not back-up directly from Picasa. I had only backed up my folder structure. This kept all the picasa.ini files that are created and all my tags came back when I reloaded my new hard drive.

I have never tried using Picasa on multiple PCs, supposedly it doesn't really work well.

I use pretty broad categories for my tagging and it works well for me. I did take an on-line class for it that was geared to digi scrappers. It was helpful, but all the info is available in the Picasa manual.

Good luck with whichever way you go.

[lindapiersma]

OK, so there's Picasa and ACDCee. Has anyone tried the "Bridges" part of CS5 yet? I had PS6 and didn't like the organizer for that. I know nothing about the CS5 organizer. Has anyone tried it? I'm looking for an easy organizational fix that doesn't entail any $, or too much time to learn and set up, but I'm beginning to doubt that there really is one. The best thing I could probably do is stop buying product. Wrap my hands, fingers curled under, in duct tape and stick them in socks.They say you can do anything with duct tape!

[anke]

that is hilarious! That has to be the worst solution yet LOL! Maybe I need to give Picasa another try. Creating those specific tags might just be the right solution...

[MIDA78466]

I use Bridge and it seems to work fine for me. When I had a PC I used ACDSee but when I switched to the Mac I couldn't find anything I just loved. Used Shoebox for a bit and hated it and switched to Bridge.

[Lindar70]

I'm a big Picasa fan for organizing my photos...maybe I should try it for my digi supplies??? I do love the search function with Picasa so maybe so....

[laura grimes]

I use Bridge, too. I really like the visibility it gives all my files, easy search as well. I am talking about regular Bridge, not Mini-Bridge.