Two things:

Two things: First, Adobe’s photo downloader is a joke- it crashes if I try and download more than a gig or so of images off my memory cards. I had gotten all excited after I saw an online video about it, and how you can automatically perform a handful of tasks as you download your images from your computer. Buuuut, if the programa crashes under too much workload, I guess good old drag-and-drop with finder will have to do. I’ve always preferred manual control over downloading images off my memory cards, because then I can see which folders I’m copying to where, and KNOW I’ve got them all downloaded to my computer.

In fact that’s one reason I prefer Adobe Bridge above other image browsing software. You see, Adobe Bridge is just that, a browser and processor. A lot of other softwares, like Lightroom, iPhoto, etc. are more like stand-alone photo albums, in that they require you to IMPORT everything you want to browse and process. You don’t get to just view folders where they are on your computer, you have to make albums, or projects or collections or whatever, within that software. I think that’s just too much. I don’t want to have a photo album on my computer organzied all one way and then have everything organized another way on my hard drive. I want to have four folders right on my desktop- one for engagements, one for weddings, one for albums, and one for events. I don’t want to have to go into a library somewhere and then sift through a ton of folders that were created automatically. That works great for iTunes, (actually for music it’s BRILLIANT) …but not for my photos!

Second, ROFL, I have to admit something slightly embarrasing: I was actually running Photoshop CS3 IN ROSETTA for as long as I’ve had it. (Rosetta, for you non-Mac users, is the “translation” software that allowed non-Intel based programs to operate on the new Intel Macs.)

As you should know, Photoshop CS3′s main highlight for Mac users was that it CAN run native on the Intel platform. Of course you can still force programs to load through Rosetta, and for some reason that little box was checked in the CS3 application info. OOPS!

Well, now it’s running truly natively, and I’m experiencing a substantial speed increase. I stitched a 6 image panorama incredibly quickly just now, it was amazing. I didn’t clock it, but it might have taken less than half a minute to spit it out. Compare that to the 15+ minutes that CS2 and my PC took. WOW.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Later!

-Matt-