Media for Memories

They grow up too quickly. One of the rituals I have instituted in my family is to look at pictures together – it is an opportunity to keep the memory of shared quality time fresh. Everyone has figured out how to shoot lots of pictures cheaply with a digital camera, but I have struggled for a while what to do with them. For a long time, they just lived on my computer and it required some effort to actually look at them.

This has changed since I connected my computer with my TV and my stereo to convert it into a media center. Now I can flip through my picture collection on my TV which is much more convenient. I’ve set my screen saver to a slide show of random pictures, which automatically initiates picture sessions. I can react to them when the opportunity is right.

With this I had the choice how to manage my media collection. The two contenders for me were Media Center for Windows 7 and Google’s Picasa.

Windows Media Center comes bundled with Windows 7. It is meant to manage your entire media experience – all of your music, videos, TV, and pictures. (Personally, I use all of these features, particularly internet TV and the Netflix integration, which helped me get rid of Time Warner’s terrible cable service). Setup is a snap – just tell Windows 7 where your pictures are, and it will import them in a pictures library. You can then easily set up slide shows (with music, if you also have your mp3 collection in WMC). The slide show is visually pleasing and has a mode where it shows you a screen full of black and white thumbnails, then zooms into one of them, bringing the color back and then flipping through a few related pictures. You have to see it to fully appreciate it but everyone who has seen it thus far is wowed. The other great advantage of WMC is the fact you can use it with a remote control (I use a Logitech Harmony) and flip through pictures from your couch. In fact, the entire experience is designed for this, so there are no advanced features like photo editing or correction. The biggest downside of WMC is the fact that the pictures do not get backed up automatically (I use Mozy for this).

Google Picasa has a very different design principle. While it also imports your existing pictures easily and allows you to create slide-shows, the real power lies in the ability to share pictures. You can create so called “Web Albums” to which you can invite family and friends, and any pictures you ad to these albums are automatically synced to the web – so much better than sending everyone emails with large attachments, and an automatic backup (Google just lowered the prices on web storage to $5/year for 20 GB, nearly as good as free.) Picasa also has much more advanced picture editing capabilities than WMC. For this power you have to sacrifice usability with a remote, and thus my wife will not touch Picasa.

I think both options can work fine, but I have stuck with Windows 7 Media Center because every member of my family can use it. Hope one of those works for you.