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I currently use Picasa to manage my photos and when I import my photos I see "doubles" because I'm shooting in both RAW and JPEG.
I'm currently moving my raw photos manually to a folder outside of Picasa to avoid viewing doubles.
How does everyone else do it when shooting in both RAW and JPEG?
Thanks.
You can select which formats that Picasa displays from the 'File types' tab in 'Options':
Tools > Options > File types
then deselect 'RAW formats'.
Picasa will then only display your JPEGs (and any other formats you may have selected in 'Options' such as TIFF).
i'd recommend saving up for lightroom. It does everything you want and more. You will quickly outgrow picasa.
You probably need to add a step in your workflow before storing them in Picasa. If you want to do this automatically with configurable settings, etc - Photo Mechanic is the best that I know for batch processing files (renaming, moving files, tagging, etc).
I meant processing here not image processing, but more like file organization before image processing.
I use an external tool to retrieve photos from the camera, placing the RAWs and JPEGs in separate directories. Picasa's RAW processing is pretty poor, anyway, at least for Canon raws; it ignores the camera's exposure decisions, which (here) frequently results in photos with very poor contrast compared to what is possible, and Picasa's manipulation tools are insufficient to correct this; so I also use an external tool to process the RAWs when I decide the JPEG version is not acceptable.
I use f-spot on linux - that has a raw+jpeg plugin which merges the RAW and JPEG images into different versions of the same picture.
Obviously that's specific to f-spot, though.
I use Lightroom for this - you can import both the JPEGs and the Raw files, then use Autostack by capture time (set to 1 sec) to stack the JPEG with the RAW image, and collapse the stacks, effectively hiding either the RAW or the JPEG. In my experience Lightroom consistantly has the JPEG as the top image in the stack, which works for me. Picasa is pretty good, especially if you are also managing videos from your digicam. If it had stacking, for me it would be a perfectly acceptable free alternative to Lightroom, accepting the develop features etc.
If I want to shoot RAW+ (say I only want RAW in case I want to do extreme editing), in Lightroom I treat RAW and JPEG separately (or else it only imports RAW). After the import, I sort by filetype, and reject all of the RAW files and hide rejected. Then I go through my standard workflow of rejecting / flagging. If there is one I want to do more editing in and am limited by JPEG, I copy the settings from the JPEG to that file's RAW and keep on going.
RAW is just as easy to use as JPEG in Lightroom and the only reason I still used JPEG was my in-camera NR, colors, and size. Now that my camera supports compressed DNG, its often less than 2x the size of a JPEG, and embedded profiles can be used with DNG making the colors much better. Now that LR3 has much better NR, better RAW demoasiacing, I've started shooting DNG only with import presets, and it's just like JPEG.
Generally I keep all my RAW photos in a separate single folder not processed by Picasa. Then I only import the JPEGs into Picasa. If there is a particular image I want to open as RAW to tweak it, it's a simple matter of looking at the JPG filename in Picasa, and opening the respective RAW filename in Photoshop from my raw images directory.
