I remember hearing a whole lot about Picasa when it first came out, but most of the interest seemed to be from people using Picasa for personal photos or from photographers. Now that I’m working with it, I’m astounded with how useful it is for academics. The ability to have local and web albums that can be shared with everyone, and that generate slideshows, and that can do embedded slideshows on websites is really wonderful for what many academics do. I’ve always saved my images to my website and just worked with webpages in general, but many people feel like they’re not good at technology (when really, applications are just often mean to users) and so something simpler and more usable is an excellent option. It also means that I can easily share multiple images from UF’s Digital Collections (like images from The Wonderful Kittens displaying above) in a way that shows the academic and entertainment value of the images and the books-as-artifacts, as with the slides with this post.
2007-08-07
ooh, nice. when it comes to images, i’m a flickr user, but after reading your post i’ll have to give picassa a try, too.