I wanted to get the new Lexar Professional UDMA 300x speed Compact Flash card for my DSLR and I’m finding out a few things needed to make this all work.

First, my Nikon D70s doesn’t transfer at the 300x speed and not many new cameras do. The camera will still use the CF and at the highest rate the UDMA will allow for the cameras slot. That’s OK, I wanted to get the images downloaded off the card as fast as possible. So, I had to get all the components together that would allow the fast possible speed, yet be a complete high-speed set so when the time comes to upgrade the other devices, everything is at it’s peak.

The components required from photo shoot to post-processing are the following.

Camera to memory card to memory card reader to computer

Each of these have different transfer rates. The Camera (CF) being about 70x, the memory card reader (9 pin 1394b Firewire) is 300x, the computer (Apple Macbook 6 pin 1394a Firewire) is about 150x.

Because the Lexar camera reader has 9 pin 1394b Firewire connections and the Macbook has 6 pin 1394a Firewire connections. I am having to find an adapter that bridges this connection “disconnect”.

I wish it did. But I have a solution … so read on. I understand beforehand that the original topic surrounds  free software, and I have no qualms about free stuff, but I wanted to give a best answer, and it required leaving the realm of free software. I encourage free software, use it, and am extremely grateful to those that produce it. I write reviews like this to help benefit them.

First and foremost. A few products and environments that I like: I love Google “stuff”. They make my life much easier. I love Mac too because it doesn’t crash and it’s user friendly, it’s useful for my family and helps me with my artsy stuff. I like UBUNTU because it’s free and fast and universally supported. Finally, I like Windows because they have great support and fast time-to-market and it’s easy to write programs for it with .NET.

As I am both a Windows software developer (on Windows) and a professional photographer/creative designer (on Mac) I have both systems. I only Develop (write software applications and do database administration) on Windows and I only do photos on my Mac. I’m hoping to do programming on Mac, but have to learn more about it.

My solution to this discussion about Picasa on the Mac is to buy Lightroom from Adobe. What’s super-nice about it is that it takes only one license to use it on both Mac and Windows. If I have to do a few things like cataloging and photo work on Windows I can, then transfer it to the Mac.

It’s also super-nice because if someone migrates from Windows to Mac, you have a Catalog (database) that functions on both machines. Just copy it over and run it in Lightroom for Mac.

The Lightroom engine is written to work with the same database structures on either machine, which are Operating System agnostic (meaning it doesn’t care what machine the database is on).

It’s been my answer. My wife loves Picasa and we run Ubuntu at home! I like it too! But I love the richer features of Lightroom. I like the simplicity of Picasa. But at the expense of being able to work on both of my machines daily, and have a professional workflow system. I had to buy Lightroom! Sorry to bust up the FREE stuff like this and suggest something that doesn’t help the free community. But this is what I had to do.

If it grabs the attention of Google to get “the party started” and get moving on it to rollout faster, then so be it.

Some additional notes: I’m trying to get my wife on Lightroom. But we run Ubuntu on our family computer, on an AMD-64 PC. Picasa runs great there too. We love it. We just had our own conversation recently that I need to upgrade our family computer and I would like to make it a Mac.

She said “As soon as Picasa comes to the Mac it would be a great move.” =)

So … the battle right now is “to teach her Lightroom”, or wait for “Picasa on the Mac”. She’s leaning towards “Picasa on the Mac”. That sounds great for me ’cause I’d love to get them Macs.