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EasyShare(ES) came with my z700 digital camera (5x optical zoom, 4mpx, uses SD memory and 2xaa batteries).

Pro: It manages the camera very well and uploads pictures to Albums under the Kodak Pictures directory.
The raw pictures are uploaded into a new directory created with the name of
the Date you perform the upload (not the date the pictures were taken). At first this seems all wrong,
but muse over it a bit and you'll see it is rational -- For a two week vacation, would you really want
14 unique directories for the trip? ES solves this viewing problem by sorting the album in multiple
ways, including View By Date Taken + Reverse Order -> the sequence the pictures were taken in!

You can create New Album names and then download them into the camera (if the camera supports this features)
so as to help you organize your pictures when they are being taken; eg: on our trip to Europe, we created an ablum
name for each city in our itinerary. When we arrived, I set that as the current Collection Name and just started
snapping pictures. When we got home and uploaded the multiple SD cards, all the Albums were loaded per the names
chosen -- really saved a lot of time.

You can add captions to you pictures, rotate Portrate views so everything is viewed right-side-up, and
edit with light/contrast.

ES also gives you a Gallery online for sharing your pictures with your friends. You upload into
collections or ablums and then invite via email your friends to see your work via a slideshow.
(they better have hispeed access).

Con: speaking about BLOATware! The update download is 35mb and worse still
is the impact of ES on your registry. Getting ES to find your camera is problematic -- sometimes
it would find it straight away, but after a software update, it may require the uninstall/reinstall of the
USB camera driver via the Device Manager. Due to a system failure, I needed to reinstall ES and
it proved to be a real chore!! The uninstall 'completed', but the reinstall was contaminated by
residual files on disk and registry entries left from the first install. Using the BIG HAMMER technique,
I deleted the files manually and then attacked the registry --
Find 'Kodak', delete the key and repeat until midnight + 3 pots of coffee!
Really brain dead registry implementation by KODAK engineers --
must have every possible interface implemented as an indirect access via a registry key.
Once I got to the end, the reinstall worked as if ES were never present (as all reinstalls should).

There are other programs are available -- it's a 50/50 choice if I would
elect to purchase this software.

nice review, my sister told me to pick one up, she said they were ok for the price, although I managed to buy a sony cybershot 7mp for only 129 usd, 5x optical zoom, also came with a 4gb sd card, it was a steal basically.

here's another tip from experience:

Don't use GB memory cards! Opt for the 512 or even the 256 mb.

Swap your SD memory cards when you get back to your hotel so that
no two memory cards should have pictures from the same calendar day!

Here's the issue -- once you have many pix already on the card,
the next time you power on to get another picture, the camera has to
read past all existing pictures before comming ready for the new shot.
If you're on a bus/train/cab and see something you like, YOU WILL MISS IT,
as it just takes too long. It also wastes your batteries

great to know, thx.

GREAT POST JO! Dead on correct! I can't stand the easyshare software. I uninstalled it and just let XP and Vista manage my photos.

I have a PCMIA SD card reader I just plug into my laptop. My dad had this left over from an old HP printer. I found out it fit into my laptop and works. I directly transfer pix now instead of hooking up a USB cable.

I want to buy one of those 7 card reading bay drive things, anyone suggest a good one?

super, as much as I hate to recommend Belkin. We have a few external card readers at work that actually work very well and they are very cheap.

Does this apply to the Kodak range of cameras or all, I ask as I recently bought a kodak C625 and with it I purchased both a 1gig and 512 gig card to take away on holiday, I never had a problem with it being ready to take pictures within about 4 seconds of power on, even when the 1gig card had over 400 pictures and some videos on it.

I also find the easy share easy to use and have added (via a mapped drive) all my existing pictures which were sorted into albums according to the original folder name, it even ignored the duplicates that were spread around the folders, it couldnt be easier to use, I just plug my camera in and the pictures are sent straight to the software, my only small complaint is the pictures are very large although im sure there is a setting on the camera somewhere to change it, and that it only creates an album based on the date you download the pictures from the camera, not the date the pictures are taken on, which would have been a bit nicer.

Regards

I have the same z700 camera that Jobeard has. I have the 1 gig card as well. I have never noticed the lag in being ready to take pictures as Jo said. Maybe his was close to full, I have around 330 pictures on my card and no lag.

yea, my card ended up with more that 800 pix, but the slow down was noticable
at about 100-200 (z700 camera).

When I had one of these I didn't use Easyshare (indeed very bloated) I installed a different camera driver so that I could basically use the camera as removable media.

awesome post! I didnt know some of that stuff

Good post, I like this.

also came with a 4gb sd card. Yes.