Google Picasa
Google to the Digital Photo Rescue Patience Is a Virture
The first time you turn on Google's image management software Picasa, it's going to scan your computer for every image it can find. In other words, if you got a new digital camera this Christmas (or earlier), this could take a while.
Is it worth the wait? We offer a tentative yes. While Picasa 2.0 has a few quirks, it delivers a smart, solid, and best of all, free, way to organize and edit your pics.
Picasa automatically imports images from practically any digital camera before creating a simple file structure that allows the user to quickly locate photos.
In addition to scrolling down a list of folders organized by date, users also can bring up a clever "timeline" — a sort of animated 3-D carousel that makes it possible to scroll through photos in chronological order. It's a fast and easy way to sort through masses of pics. Adobe Photoshop Album offers a similar feature.
Once located, pictures can be edited with any of a dozen or so basic editing tools — make the pic brighter, fix the contrast, modify the colors, etc. There are a few neat effects too, including a faux film grain, a soft focus effect, and "warmify," which makes colors "warmer" or, as far as we could tell, "more brown."
Pictures can be easily uploaded to a number of popular photo-sharing sites, including Shutterfly and Ofoto, or burned onto CD or DVD. The software also integrates with Picasa's own photo-sharing client, Hello, a peer-to-peer, photo- and text-sharing program that works like instant messaging. (Hello has to be downloaded independently, both by you and by anyone you want to share pictures with.)
Avoiding First Sweep Delays and Other Tics
As for the interminable first sweep in which Picasa catalogs your images, it's worth noting a work-around. Picasa gathers up JPEGs, GIFs and other formats, including video files. It defaults to scanning your entire hard drive, but users can limit the search to just the Windows desktop, My Documents folder, and the My Pictures folder in order to speed things along.
Finding, filing, and fiddling about with effects — all look good. But there's an annoying tic to Picasa that has to do with the status of an edited photo.
Say you have tweaked a photo until it looks good. There's no simple Save button to lock in the changes. Picasa will show you the changes and even let you undo those edits indefinitely — a very nice option. Leave Picasa, however, and you can't see the changes anymore. That is, the photo opens in its original state when viewed by any other means.
The only way around this that we could find was to use the Export function. This will move a copy of the edited photo into a new folder, leaving you with two copies of the picture floating around plus a whole new folder. The process starts out confusing and ends up awfully inconvenient.
As long as we are griping, let's talk about folder organization. Picasa organizes folders from the date of their creation. So if you snap a glowing portrait of your mother-in-law this week and put it in the folder MotherInLaw, then the next pic you snap and file in MotherInLaw two years from now will be located alongside that original shot, by Picasa's timeline, rather than being identified as a more recent picture.
Moreover, the chronological listing of folders in the main library is not always "chronological." Say you export a photo to new folder XYZ. Instead of showing XYZ at the top of the library with all the newest stuff, Picasa displays the folder at the bottom of the list, under a separate heading for exported pictures.
Things would be easier if Picasa would allow you to simply access a Windows Explorer folder tree view. Still, once you get your head around the logic of this timeline, it can be relatively easy to access and navigate.
Picasa won't be the software of choice for the serious photographer, but as a free app it will serve the needs of casual picture-takers. Find, edit, and share — if you're not looking for anything too sophisticated beyond these basic functions, Picasa will probably do the trick.
Pros: Makes pictures readily available for easy editing and sharing, advanced one-click editing features, handily organizes large collections of images, can't complain about the price (it's free)
Cons: Folder structure takes a while to learn and even then can be confusing, initial organization can take a long time if there are many images on your hard drive, saving edited images is cumbersome and counterintuitive
