Picasa

I'd come across Picasa very briefly last year when helping colleagues get photos into Blogger via Hello, but hadn't looked further at it because I already had a tool that would do what I wanted with organising my photos on my home computer. Since then I have experimented a little with Flickr for online sharing.

I got a request from a teacher about what alternatives there were for storing assessment evidence in the form of photos. Digital cameras are becoming more common and are used to gather evidence of learner's skills.

Picasa seems to meet most of the requirements:
- allow users to organise/ categorise photos eg tags, folder names, album names/ labels - such as student name, unit number, class group, qual name preferably more than one tag
- allow users to easily backup to alternative drives or archive to storage media such as cdrom
- allow users to print 'contact sheets' of whole/part albums of photos
In an ideal world the software would also smoothly acquire the photos from a range of cameras and not cost too much/ be free.

In addition I was able to install the program to a network drive rather than the C drive so that means a couple of neat things:
- backups are regularly done of the network drives, and
- teachers can access their files from any computer on the network

I now need to see if this solution is OK by the IT support area. I know many cameras come with software that can do all this - I use the Kodak Easyshare software for example. Having a piece of software that could be recommended for the whole organisation also means we start building more expertise in using the system, rather than each person learning a different piece of software and creating a maze of software support issues.