Last October when I bought a Canon Rebel XTi camera I found that if I shot in RAW mode that Picasa (version 2.6.0) would display the images with a strange blue-purple hue. I filed a bug with Google back then, and got the standard response that the camera wasn’t supported yet but they would pass it along to their development team. I had naively been assuming that if the CR2 format worked for the XT then it would work for the XTi. Clearly not the case. I haven’t found a good explanation about what is different, other than the size of the image.

Now it’s almost March and while they don’t support it yet, there is a posting in their forum collecting information on cameras that they don’t support and certainly the Rebel XTi is a popular one. In the meantime I’ve been playing with a trial of Adobe Lightroom that just went 1.0. I’m still a finding my way around, but it seems pretty nice for what I need, but a little sluggish in parts. Currently there is a limited time price of $199 on Lightroom before going to $299 in April. Having to actually pay for software is almost foreign to me at this point. Like, shouldn’t they just give it away for free?