Nixta Sinks

The Smiiiithsonnnns

Today has been something of a hectic day for me, having dragged myself out of bed at 4:45am in Monaco (3:45am London time) to get myself and my mum out of town. We drove to find the station, courtesy of James, only for me to totally misdirect us around town, getting therejust in time to unceremoniously dump mater on her train 30 seconds before it left. Mind you, there was no ticket office open so if she had got there earlier she would have just been standing around for ages. After that, Jonky Cat dropped me off at the no-loading-nor-dropping-off Nice airport where I sat around for quite a while eating frankly disappointing pastries.

And that sums up that part of France for me. Disappointing pastries. The wedding was superb, but it was unusual. Only the best would do for the happy couple, and it was well received but I can't help but think it was somewhat beyond the ordinary experience of that part of the world. Such beauty ruined by tremendously cramped quarters wherever you went. To enjoy the Cotes D'Azur you have to be a wee bit richer than the average bear and look down from the high-rise, not up at it, and if you're not that tad wealthier then the beaches are shit and the sea is made of shit and those around you do nothing but talk shit and your picanic basket will have two-day-old mass-produced plastic-coated pain-au-chocolats in it.

But we weren't there as ordinary yokels. The wedding was extraordinary. And very very generously laid on. Luckily I had a camera to document the whole thing, and in part-two of Nixta's belated photo editing reviews, let's talk about Picasa while those photos upload to Flixta.

Since last week I have barely had 6 hours sleep a night. All to do with stressing about work, I should add. And I'm now so tired that I just can't sleep. So instead I've been familiarising myself with Google's Picasa, which until this holiday I had, for some unknown and unfathomable reason, assumed was an on-line service to rival Flickr. Instead, James pointed out that it's an offline application to rival Lightroom, whose praises I was so naively singing just a few posts ago. I'm so slow sometimes.

Lightroom is faster, slicker, and definitely more tailored to professional image lifecycles. But I'm not an image professional, so I'm going to give Picasa a go. It's free, after all, and thoroughly impressive as such. It doesn't have hierarchical collection structures of Lightroom, but it does handle movies. It doesn't have the depth of image-processing that Lightroom has, but it does have very powerful editing behind a simple interface. It's not quite as fast as Lightroom, but it's at present more reliable. It doesn't have the side-by-side compare mode or split-photo effect-editing of Lightroom, but it probably will soon. In one regard I imagine that Lightroom will continue to stay ahead of Picasa, and that's printing. Or more accurately perhaps, it'll target a different kind of printing.

My original point still remains. Apple's Aperture will have its work cut out to stay alive, especially if Google work on their Linux codebase to port Picasa to Mac OS. Lightroom has a chance in hell but both it and Picasa will probably find quite disjoint user-bases.

And so, having dozed off for a moment on my way back from Monaco, I awoke to stumble down a conveyor belt and be greeted by the saddening yet surreal news that old Croc Hunter will use his children as bait no more. I've been in that kind of mood all through my subsequent 9 hour day at the grindstone.