My wife has been using Kodak’s Easyshare software to manage her photos for several years. She has had difficulties doing just about everything that she wants to do with the software. She has a Kodak camera and likes it just fine.
Does anyone here have any experience migrating from Kodak’s software to some other software? If so, I would appreciate hearing about your experiences and any advice you may have. Thanks.
My mom has been pretty successful using Picasa from Google since she got her camera. She didn’t have to migrate from something else, though. But the instructions were pretty good IMHO.
Why use software at all? I have a folder called “Pictures” on my hard drive, and store all of my pictures in subfolders. I don’t mean this to sound snarky, I’m just curious as to why software is necessary to “manage” pictures.
I believe that when my wife bought the camera, it came with software that she thought she needed to install in order to unload pictures from the camera. Whether or not that was true, that’s what she has done. I have not attempted to dig into this myself yet. My OP pretty much reflects my ignorance of digital cameras. She’s the family picture taker. Maybe all I need to do is hook her camera up to my computer, which has no Kodak software, and see if I can unload them.
Your question didn’t seem snarky at all to me.
By my definition, what you are calling ‘managing’ pictures would be ‘storing’ pictures. The software referred to is for making pictures lighter or darker, removing red eye, cropping, etc. I have converted many poor pictures into very good pictures with the use of software.
The software usually come with its own tricks, or systems, for organizing pictures, too, but they aren’t necessary for storing pictures.
I used to use Easyshare with my previous digital camera until I gave up on it. At least with mine (sorry - it’s old and broken and buried in one of my boxes of junk; I don’t know the model) I had no problem just hooking it up to my computer without the software; look in My Computer after you hook it up and see if it shows up as another device.
Been a couple of years since I’ve bought a digital camera, but you shouldn’t need any software at all.
The camera probably defaults to saving images in .jpg format. Those can be uploaded directly to your computer, most likely. My experience has been that any proprietary software that comes with cameras is:
A. Terrible
B. Unnecessary
What’s worse, they sometimes try to change the image formats to something unrecognizable by anything other than that particular software. Just use the tools that come with your computer for moving and storing, and download some freeware for photo manipulation.
In my book the gold standard in picture editing and storage is the free program Irfanveiw and the plugins that go along with it. I quit using camera software long ago in favor of uploading the camera with the camera wizard to my file and editing from there. This technique is seamless and flawless. You can compress images using RIOT now so instead of a 3MB picture it can be what you want such as 150kb. Adjust the quality level as desired. I get tired of people sending me 3MB pictures that only show 200kb or something on my screen anyway.
Camera software is too bloated. I have the fresh Canon and Kodak CD’s sitting unopened for my latest equipment.
Another vote for Picasa. That program is awesome and the price is right.
My camera saves in JPEG format straight to the memory card, and then I just plug the memory card directly into my computer and copy the pictures over. No fancy software needed. (My computer has a card slot for SD cards; depending on the type of memory card your camera uses, you may need a card reader. But those are inexpensive.)
Thanks to all. My wife was using the Kodak software both to manage (store, categorize into albums, other filing tasks) and edit (crop, adjust) her pictures. She likes Kodak for edit work, hates it for filing. I have verified that her computer will upload the pictures without the Kodak software, and she can still use it to edit her pics. Thanks again.