Office Picture Manager and other programs

I recently found Microsoft Office Picture Manager, and I must say I’m quite impressed.

For viewing pictures I use IrfanView, and for managing my photos I use Picasa, but from time to time I need some ad-hoc operations on files, and for this, Office Picture Manager does a great job. Here are two examples:

• I needed to crop faces from some family pictures to put in the profiles my Geni‘s family tree. Cropping was never so easy with Office Picture Manager.
• I collect screenshots of our customers screens, and some times when they open a case, they send a word document with screenshots. I found that the best way to get an image out of a Word document to a graphic file is simply to paste it in Office Picture Manager.

It takes some getting used to, as it has these side-bar task panes instead of dialogs, but for the kind of work I need it for, it does the work.

Speaking good on Microsoft, I’m feeling quite comfort with their Windows Live Writer, although it is in beta. This is rather surprising, as I usually don’t publish anything nowadays without passing it through Word 2007 wonderful spell checker but since it saves me the hassle of re-introducing the links after copying the edited text, I’m going with it. I hope I don’t make any embarrassing mistakes. I also hope that the Writer team will find a way to integrate it with Word 2007 spell checker. One other missing option is the ability to easily add a category from Writer.

Speaking of Word 2007, I plan to have a post where I list all the good things I found in Office 2007 versus the annoying things.

And finally, speaking of graphics software, I’m in a constant search for a replacement to Picasa. After all, Google doesn’t really know how to build desktop application that pleases developers. They make it too simple with no advanced options (not to mention scripting), and that really annoys me. But the most two features that annoys me are the amazing thing that you don’t easily see what albums a pictures is already related to, and also the annoying but with the keywords auto-completion for non-English languages (can’t find a link right now).

I do like the option to relate each picture to several categories (a.k.a tagging, a.k.a albums) which is not found in every other photo manager. Obviously, Flickr would be the right place to go, but my wife don’t like the idea of having our pictures on the web.