I’ve decided to step my game up and move to Lightroom from Picasa. I’ve liked Picasa, but want more control, and it doesn’t hurt that Lightroom already supports the Rebel XTi’s RAW format. One feature that Lightroom doesn’t have that I’ll miss is the Google Earth integration to geotag photos. One aspect that I like about Lightroom is that the data is stored in the images or sidecars, and should be portable for the future. No one wants to lose all that metadata, or have to do it more than once. That said, I have a lot of archives to sift through once I get them all imported.
Before commiting to Lightroom I wanted to make sure that uploading to Flickr is still easy. And following these instructions on creating an Export Present did the trick, with two caveats. The first is that my Flickr Uploader (v2.3 on XP) crashes if it isn’t already launched. The second is that the Flickr Uploader loses metadata if it resizes the images. Changing it to not resize the images client-side fixes the problem, although the Uploader does not show the tags they will show up properly on the web.
Now on to trying to decide how to organize my photos by keywords, collections, rating, and color labels.