Category: M@’s Picks

Google’s Picasa is a simple yet powerful way to store your photos. Once installed, it will scan your drive for images and present the chronologically by folders. You can then add your own tags to any image, and create albums of images, photos can even exist in more than one album.

Once you’ve got things tagged and organized, the search function lets you quickly find any images within Picasa. There’s some simple editing and tuning tools, one of which is “I’m feeling lucky.” From a technical standpoint it’s a level adjustment algorithm, but like a Google search by the same name, it almost always makes the photo look better.

It’s integrated with Picasa Web Albums, so you can publish your photos online. Picasa is also integrated with various on-line photo finishers, so you can upload to them directly from the program. Finally, it has tools for creating web pages from a selection of photos, based on a customizable template.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) service coupled with Jungle Disk is an excellent, inexpensive solution for on-line backup.

The Amazon service is $0.15 per gigabyte per month, and $0.10 per gigabyte transferred. It’s pay as you go, so you’re never paying for more storage or bandwidth than you need.

Jungle Disk is a very user friendly front end for the Amazon service. It creates a new network drive on your system that is your access to your storage. Use it just like it’s a local drive in any application. It also includes a customizable backup utility that will backup at a scheduled time and keep archived versions of changed files. Finally, it’s free to try and only $20 to buy it. The license is for every one of your computers, including a USB drive friendly version that you can run on any system without needing to install it.

Pandora is your own personalized internet radio station. Once you sign up, you start by telling Pandora about one artist that you like. It then uses data collected as part of the Music Genome Project to find other music you might like. It then begins playing music. As each song comes up you have the option to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Pandora then uses this feedback to refine your playlist. Even better, Pandora now supports several mobile phones. You can see if they support yours at here.