Monday, April 20, 2009

Kodak Easyshare. The software, not the camera

Kodak confuses us customers by marking "Easyshare" on the cameras and then using it as the name of the camera support program. You know, the CD that comes packed with a new camera. It's the program that sucks photos out of the camera and onto the hard drive. Anyhow, I am talking about the Easyshare program, not the camera here.
I'm currently on the lookout for a Easyshare replacement. What do I have against the factory program? Several things.
1. Slow and fat. It takes forever to load. Tries to become ram resident, i.e. load automatically at boot time whether you need it or not. Which slows the computer's boot up. After I defeated Easyshare's automatic loading, it still worked, but it wouldn't stop and shut down. It hung around in ram slowing everything else. I used Windows Task Manager to kill it off and the machine became noticeably quicker.
2. You can't find your photos out side of Easyshare. This is a pain. To upload photos to Facebook or other websites you must find the photos on disk, using programs other than Easyshare. Easyshare uses numbers for filenames. So, is the cute photo you just uploaded 110575.jpg or is it 110492.jpg? Who knows?
3. Easyshare's "albums" don't coorespond to disk file folders. I upload some photos into a album 20-03-09. (automatically generated album name of today's date.). I sort them out, moving some pictures into album "cats" and others into album "model trains". When I go to upload the pictures from "model trains" I can't find the files in folder "model trains" they are still in folder "20-03-09" Cool. I'm having trouble locating photos I sucked in today. God help me finding anything next year.
4. Easyshare offers to put your photo's on the web, so others can link to them. Only it doesn't work. To get a link to a photo on the web, you have to pay money to buy "Gallery Plus". Cheaper is to put your photos on Photobucket, which is free and will give you a link to the photo for use on other websites.
5. Easyshare won't "move" a photo from one album to another. All it does is copy. To "move" you have to first copy the photo to the new album and then delete it from the old one.
6. You can't back up your Easyshared photos on your hard drive. The "album" information (which photo from which folder goes into which album) is hidden somewhere on hard drive. Just backing up the Easyshare folders to CD won't get the album information. And without that, you will never find the photo you need out of a modest collection of only a thousand photos.
So, soon as I find some other program that will suck the photos out of the camera, I'm ditching Easyshare.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The curent Easy Share does suck. I have a previous version which allows you to install just the camera connection software ONLY, which is very small. This allows the camera to be seen as a mass storage device rather then a "camera." If anyone wants the old file, download it here:
http://home.comcast.net/~rr.buff/old_easyshare.zip

Dstarr said...

I'll check that out. Thanks for the pointer.