I've been a long time user of Picasa (the Windows desktop application, not Picasa Web Albums), and have roughly 40k photos. The photos are a mix of my own digital snapshots, and scans of my 35mm film and old family photos. Now that Google has announced they're ending support for Picasa (not that it was ever well supported, but at least it was free) I'm thinking about moving to Lightroom.
The problem is that Picasa is, like Lightroom, a non-destructive editor. Thousands of my photos have edits (mostly straightening and crops), which I would like to carry over to Lightroom. As I see it, I have two options:
- Save the photos within Picasa before importing into Lightroom. Picasa saves a copy of the original in a hidden subdirectory, and then saves the photo with the edits applied. (Or equivalently export all my photos to a new directory tree.) I think that Lightroom will ignore the hidden subdirectories, so all history will be lost in Lightroom, and I won't have easy access to the originals any more.
- Import the photos as-is into Lightroom, and then redo the edits. I won't know which photos have been edited, or what I did to them. Many hours of work lost.
Does anyone have experience with either method, or advice? Ideally I'd like to have Lightroom know about the edits, so that I have access to both the originals and the edited version within Lightroom. Is that possible?
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