Reviews
February 19, 2005 07:15 PM PST
Picasa is a photo management program that has became a free download when the company was acquired by Google. It is a full commercial quality application, along the lines of iPhoto for the Mac. I felt that the initial rev of the product has some stability issues, but I have seen no problem with the latest version 2.0.
Image Management on Disk
The disk image management features are the best I've seen. Picasa can monitor arbitrary directories for images, and auto-update its index of thumbnails. You can move, add and delete images in explorer and picasa reflects these changes in real time. One of the only drawbacks I saw to the program, is that it will scan your My Documents folder or the entire hard drive for images and video files when first installed. There's no option to not watch your entire documents directory on install, but this can be changed once the program is up and running. Be aware that by default, Picasa won't scan the directories for PNG files, and you must explicitly enable this type of file in the program options.
Picasa has a very cool thumbnail type view of images, which can be dynamically sized on the fly. I am a big fan of the thumbnail view in explorer (would it be so hard for Apple to have this on the Mac?), but currently, I find myself bringing up Picasa rather than ever clicking on the "My Pictures" folder.
Picasa allows you to store multiple, arbitrary labels in its internal database for each picture. These labels operate as virtual folders, so for example if you were to select a bunch of holiday photos, right click, and label them "Holiday"; Picasa would have a new view on the left pane (in addition to the file/folder view) called Holiday. This is a very nice management feature, and something I don't understand why Apple or Microsoft refuse on doing in their OS. Come on - Be had "dynamic query folders", as does Picasa, Thunderbird and Outlook 2003.
Image Management
I'd say that Picasa is worth using just for the image organization features, but they're just the tip of the iceberg. Picasa has nearly all the important image management tools typically used in Photoshop by the enthusiast. The most important one is "I'm feeling lucky". This button will auto-adjust the color, light and contrast balance in the image. It works amazingly well. Apply to to some of your photos and you'll be hooked.
Other adjustments such as red-eye work very well. The arbitrary, dynamic image rotation also makes it very easy to correct for a crooked horizon line, and is the nicest interface to this problem I've seen. The only filter I'm really missing is "Unsharp Mask". I find that in Photoshop this is a lot better than "Sharpen" for bringing out detail in hazy shots. I would like to see Picasa support 3rd party Photoshop plugins (or at a minimum, implement Unsharp Mask).
Just like the image labels, the transforms are do not modify the actual image. Every transform, from rotating images to cropping and color adjustment is stored as a transform "layer", very similar in functionality and speed to Photoshop. This means that each transform is un-doable, even months later.
Transform layers are a really nice feature, but require a change in mindset. You basically have to "export" selected pictures from Picasa in order to generate Jpeg images with the transforms applied. In general you will view all photos in Picasa, or export them to Blogger or one of several online photo printing companies, so it's not a big deal. You can also send filtered photos from Picasa to your default email client, Gmail, or Google's Hello service. The only extra step is when you need to export them to actual files for posting to a non-Google run website. I'd like Google to support 3rd party extensions to Picasa, to allow posting to MovableType, etc.
The exporting feature is nice in allowing you to specify the width of the photos as well as the Jpeg quality. I would like for the export to optionally generate thumbnail images, and support formats other than Jpeg. Specifically, if you were using Picasa to manage high-end digital photos, you would want the ability to export TIFF and PNG for lossless images. Then again, you would probably be using Photoshop...
Conclusion
Download it - it's a great application - elegant, stable and free. I like it better than iPhoto in both features and performance. Microsoft should include it as part of their OS. :-)
Comments (3)
I'll have to try this out when I get some time. I also was having some stability issues with the first version so I stopped using it.
Best compliment for Picasa2 is that I love it because I can geek out on it or do something quick. The effects are awesome. Last night I showed my wife how to use it and with just a few minutes of showing her around she was labeling and emailing pictures and all kinds of stuff.
After using Photoshop for the past few years being able to do the same actions in a fraction of the time with a kick ass UI is really awesome.
Now available for Linux...
I've installed it on my Gentoo machine and it's working fine so far. I've read about some unstableness, but nothing abnormal beyond general WINE apps.
Picasa for Linux