01 May

Posted at 10:15h in Lightroom, Technique by
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This post had been waiting in my drafts folder for a long time! Here it is published at last! After the recent announcement by Google that they would stop active development of Picasa Desktop, a lot of people are looking for an alternative to replace it without losing all their albums, keywords,... Good news for those who have been using Picasa Desktop to manage their pictures collection and want to switch to Lightroom: my plugin Lightroom to Picasa Importer is now available. You might have seen my previous post about my procedure to convert Picasa Desktop albums into Lightroom collections. Although this was working, I found that it was a really cumbersome procedure and I wanted to find an easier way to do it. So, after a lot of information gathering and research on the structure of the Picasa database, I had enough information to try and build a Lightroom plugin to do the work automatically. I decided to take the plunge and quickly learned how to code in Lua to be able to write a plugin for Lightroom.

30 May

Posted at 22:40h in Photography, Technique, Tutorial by
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Picasa icon arrow icon Lightroom icon

For sorting and classifying my pictures, I have been using Picasa for quite some time now. While I still believe that this is the fastest images manager that I have ever seen, it has some limitations and I have been thinking about using Adobe Lightroom instead. My only issue before switching to Lightroom was that I first had to make sure that I could import the numerous albums that I had created to sort my pictures in Picasa. With 40K+ pictures and several thousands sorted in albums, I could not afford to lose this information when switching to Lightroom. A related issue was that I had many star-rated pictures in Picasa that I also wanted to transfer. Neither Picasa nor Lightroom support this kind of transfer and I could not find any solution that suited me on the Internet. So I looked at the problem myself. Dissecting the required process into simple steps made it easier to find a solution. The rest of this post will describe how I did it.