Right now I have a Sony camera and I download my pictures to Picassa.

I am getting a new camera, a Canon, and my husband will be using the Sony.

So my question is: Can a person use 2 different brands of camera and still download to the same (Picassa) site? I guess what I mean is, when I install the "stuff" for the new Canon, will all the other "stuff" still stay there?

I am, as you may notice, not very bright in regards to cameras and computers, so excuse my (perhaps) foolish question. I just want to make sure that we can both use Picassa as I am very pleased with how easy it is for me to navigate, plus I have all my other photos there.

Thanks! Shannon

Hi Shannon,
I had the same dilemma - switched from a Kodak camera to a Canon...all pictures stayed on the Picasa site, so no problem there. Isn't Picasa fun? Unless you're a very serious photographer, Picasa is more than adequate and the I'm feeling lucky works wonders on my pictures.

Although I have never uploaded any pictures to the Picasa site, there will be no problems with changing to a different camera - a Jpeg image is a Jpeg image as far as Picasa is concerned regardless of which camera you shot it with, and all your photos are stored on you hard drive anyway. There is provision to backup all your photos to CD or DVD in Picasa - well worth while doing - you never know when your hard drive is going to croak it - if it does you may well have lost all your memories.

Although the facility to upload photos to the Picasa site is available, I have never seen the need to do it - I store all my photos on two hard drives and do a DVD backup occasionally.

PS if you have never tried it - if you have taken a photo under adverse lighting conditions (heavy back light, low frontal light - the sort of occasion when you should have used the flash as a fill in ie dark faces against a bright sky) then try the 'fill light' tweak (under either the 'basic' or 'tuning' tab) - it works miracles!!!

Unfortunately this particular forum doesn't allow attachments, so I am not able to show you the difference between a photo that is not worth printing and one that is well worth printing (both from the same shot, plus or minus a 'fill light' adjustment).

Trust me! there is a lot of information stored in a digital image which you will not see in a bog standard rendition, but a tweak or two allows you to see the information which your eyes saw at the time, but the camera apparently didn't see. It did see what you saw, but you need to tweak the image to show what you expected to see. Forget film cameras, there was little room for compensation if you got it wrong, these new fangled digital cameras store enough information to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear if you know how to do it!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Steve H,

Thanks for that info, NY Judy, and faithful Steve, it was most helpful. Backing up my pictures is a good idea, and it's something that I've been meaning to do for ages, I guess now is as good a time as any. I did have a computer crash once before and lost everything, luckily it was before I had a digital camera, so there were no pictures.

That "fill the light" tweak thing is AMAZING! It's like a little bit of magic (and let's face it, I still think the whole computer world is a little magical )

Shannon