I purchased Lightroom2 from Adobe some time ago and used it to edit and track my picture collection. Then I tried out Picasa from Google and found it much easier and intuitive to use. It also has Google search built in so once pictures are labeled, captioned, tagged or key-worded they are easy to find. Since Picasa is also free that made it an easy choice.
Unfortunately, when we came back from our Arizona desert wildflower trip with 3,400 pictures to process some of the strengths of Lightroom for workflow management became apparent.
Lightroom3 beta was available now so I installed it. I find it incorporates some of the watermarking capability it previously lacked. This is good because I like to watermark my images before I publish them. Even more important is that Lightroom supports virtual copies. You can make as many virtual copies of an image as you want and treat each of them differently. With Picasa I would have to undo the changes and re-export for each set of changes. That means I would have to remember what I had done and/or where I used the exported picture.
I think Picasa is the tool of choice for most people. It really is easy to use and understand and it’s ability to add captions to pictures is much better than Lightroom. I assume that is, at least in part, because Adobe is trying to preserve the Photoshop niche. Virtual copies and more powerful organizing tools require me to use Lightroom. You can probably see where this is going…
I’m going to have to use both for at least a while.