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Use Picasa! http://www.picasa.com/ And you have to don't give up your rights to your pictures. By the way, they even have a Linux version available. :)

While I agree that would suck, your "Gmail all the way." direction might need some thought. You're ditching a free email account with a company that deleted historical emails and switching to one that deleted their own blog and has access to not only your emails but search patterns, photos, probably PC files, and who knows what else.

Just get your own domain name and hosting account and do it yourself.

I agree with GP, I do not know why people continue to *believe* that typing cryptic commands to the computer is easy, again it may be straight forward when YOU KNOW HOW but it is not easy to INFERE when you do not know the commands.

for one, what THE FUCK does eselect opengl set nvidia means? that does not makes any sense, again what does emerge nvidia-kernel means??

Give a doctor those instructions and they will just unplug the cord and go to read a book. You have to have a very narrow perspecitve to think like that. One of the main goals of software usuability is to allow people to INFERE by themselves how to use something with their prior knowledge.

People know how to search in google. And if they need to do something they will search in google.

I will take the time to give you a step by step example.
Lets imagine our hypothetical Jane average user who has returned from London and has her digital camera full with pictures, now she wants to make an album on her computer. She has two different choices:

google "photo album windows XP"
or
google "photo album linux".

In the first case, if she has Windows, the first 3 google search results are:
1. Microsoft Windows XP - Make a photo album on your computer
2. Picasa
3. Digital Photography - Reviews and free downloads at Download.com

The frist option is a page containing detailed step by step instructions on how to make a Windows Folder and use it as a photo album.
The second option is Picasa which will direct you to download and install the program by clicking "open" (after that, you know it is Next/Next/Next).
The third option will direct you to download.com, which provides a list of photo album applications like FlipAlbum (ha, my father bought that IIRC).

Now, with our Linux Jane, what do we have as the 3 first results:
JAlbum - free web photo album software and photo gallery software
Corel Corporation - Home of CorelDRAW, WordPerfect, Paint Shop Pro ...
Linux Online - Application: Web Photo Album

The first one is the closer to an answer, it takes you to Jalbum, unfortuantely you must register with some personal data (so much for the Open Source karma uh?) and you may need to download and install Java runtime.

If our Jane have not run yet, she will download the .bin, and then she may try to open it (supposing that she is using fedora core 4 with Gnome she may double click or right click and open, or just click open on the firefox download window) and then a big text full big X error window will appear saying: "Cannot open JAlbuminstall.bin".

Of course, she should know better as to change the rights to executable in the properties windows and then after that, open a terminal and run it... but that was just too much, so she went to the second option... ... Which takes her to Corel corporation, and after wandering around she finds Corel Photo Album, and after clicking on the "Try It" link she may create an account and download the program just to see that it is an EXE, whoops, not for Linux (she might even read the System Requirments before doing all that...).

So, she goes to the third option, it seems good:

Web Photo Album automatically generates photo albums on the fly from directories containing your favorite photos. Supports captions (including HTML tags), definable page sizes, forward and reverse preview, and index pages. All preview and inde

Seriously, Picasa is fantastic. Yet another formerly-commercial package bought by Google, improved, and distributed free.

It has a nice interface, the common photo editing tools are straightforward to use, and since the Google days, there's even an I'm Feeling Lucky button for colour and tone enhancement! I use Photoshop every day, and love it, but it took an awful lot of work to learn it. Picasa, though, I just installed and started using straight away.

http://www.picasa.com/

In the wake of recent releases of Google Desktop 2.0 Beta and Google Talk 1.0 Beta, Gmail now is finally open to everyone. Other exciting rumors suggest that Google may even try to compete with Internet Explorer by producing a product called GBroswer. Other Google features include Maps, Blogger, Hello, iGoogle, Google Earth, and Picasa. Now it appears they've produced a new Google Theme Song.

Hello is an IM program in it's own right, owned and operated by Google.

Oh no! Yahoo bought something? Are you serious?! Well, long live Google then, because they invent everything in house, don't they?

Picasa?. Free (as in beer). Getting better with each release. WFM, YMMV.

It would be naive to think that Google has so far not been associating searches with Google IDs already. That is the whole idea behind there huge "takeover" of the world, isn't it? To borrow from what I read somewhere when Gmail was released, they know what your interests are, what you buy, who your friends are etc etc.

They're sitting on a gold mine of information. Gmail was the carrot they offered to everyone to get them to sign up, because not everyone blogs but, surely, everyone needs email. And boy were they right! Everyone's moved to gmail and viola - you can now map every little thing they do.

I'm sure they use it internally in one form or the other - evil or otherwise i.e. to give me "better" ads - exactly what I need :roll: Only now they've decided to "open" part of it to the public - "we have all this information with us anyways, let's give some of it to the public and win some more brownie points in the process"

Of course, Yahoo! does that as well, and I'm sure MSN too. They've had the "IDs" all along - Google had it the hard way - they HAD to come up with Gmail or they had no chance.

Picasa from Google does that I think.

Because we all know that Google never buys companies just to get at technology, right?

Microsoft also has one of the largest corporate CS research departments in the industry, and they frequently contribute to everything from journals to W3C specification committees.

It's a lot easier to spread into new markets when you can siphon profits from a monopoly you hold in another market.

• Blogger
• Google Maps
• Google Desktop Search
• Google SMS Search
• Picasa
• Keyhole
• Google Video Search
• Froogle Price Search
• GMail

All ancillary products paid for by the main product.

Have a reality check; all companies do this. You have a good product and you put that money back into R&D for new products. Take a look at the cash flow sheet of any publicly traded company, and stop being a basher. Try to put logic into an argument.

It's called Picasa. It's a Windows-based program, though. Version 1 was very pretty but a bit slow on my comp. Haven't checked out v2 yet.

Many pictures include this sort of search-rich information, either from the camera or added manually, using cataloging software. Google's Picasa 2 freeware (Windows only) embeds it's key words just so. Microsoft Research's excellent freeware (Windows only) World-Wide Media eXchange tools do the same for geo-coding photos. There are numerous other tools that can do the same, leading to a significent set of internally 'tagged' material.

So, why aren't the search engines taking advantage of this? They're already loading the images and creating thumbnails, how much extra work is it to extract any additional information in the file and use that in it's indexing too, especially compared to the potentially increased accuracy?

I don't know about the probability of success of such an idea, but otherwise, what was the point of Picasa, free photo library software provided by Google?

I was completely baffled as to how such a thing would fit into Google's plans. This OS idea might be an answer ...

I expect it to be a distribution of Linux, however, with some proprietary things overlaying it, perhaps a little like Darwin/Mac OS X.

If it happens, that is. Google certainly has enough money to make it happen, and perhaps enough hubris for a "We'll take over the world!" sort of plan.

D

While I agree with you that things are not very well integrated on a cheap PC, and the programs you get with it are usually substandard, adware or worse, Picasa for Windows is in my opinion a better solution than iPhoto 4. It's slicker, looks like it doesn't have a crazy folder structure for the pics, and has some nice presentation options (not to mention integration with Blogger). The little collages option looks cute too. Problem for not very savvy users is that they have to find out about it and download it though.

Having said that iPhoto 5 looks like it will be a good upgrade and will hopefully fix some of the gripes people have with the older iPhoto. In a way it'd be nice if Picasa was on the mac too to provide some competition.

I use a mac as my main machine and wouldn't use Windows, but the Apple iApps are not always the best of category (at least not in the first few iterations). It's more that the combination means you have reasonably good solutions out of the box for everything you'd like to do, solutions which just work and don't get in the way (no clippy!).

Here is how Picasa fits into Google's philosophy: (those guys are so smart!!!)

From http://www.picasa.com/features/features-edit.php : "Write captions that stay with the picture. Picasa 2 makes captions the way journalists do using the IPTC standard. That means your captions are saved within their pictures and stay with them, whether you export as a web page, make a CD presentation, or share them using Hello. Picasa captions are fully editable and searchable, and you choose whether to display them or not."

Don't you see it? By getting the world to use Picasa to organize their photos, Google is also getting them to encode the photo captions and keywords into the image file - thus making photos searchable!

What an elegant solution to a troublesome search problem. Give away great software for free and get people to make their photos Googleable.

Note here is the link to the FAQ item that tells you about the fact that you must run as Administrator!

• JPG
• GIF
• PSD
• PNG
• BMP
• TIFF
• RAW format including NEF and CRW
• MPG
• AVI
• ASF
• WMV
• MOV

Here's a direct download link to Picasa 2 Enjoy!

http://www.picasa.com/

That's all I can think of for now...how about listing some free (good) games too? :)

Google's Picassa is a great free image management tool.

Talking about digital photography - if you've got a family member who's got Windows and a digital camera but finds the included software overly slow and/or complicated, give Picasa a try. Standard disclaimer - I'm in no way affiliated with the company, just someone who was really impressed with how straightforward Picasa is to use.

Non-patronising, doesn't spam the user with constant hand-holding, but incredibly simple - importing photos, organising them, printing and emailing them (even from Mozilla Thunderbird), it's a very impressive program. Plus it runs remarkably well on older computers - my mother has it running on a 333MHz K6-2, and it feels much faster than iPhoto 4 on my iBook...

Highly recommended!

Google already has an IM client. It's called Hello, and they got it when they bought Picasa.

Here Here! As much as I like advocating open source, I have a hard time setting people up with GIMP because it's not very friendly to average users. I'm much more inclined to suggest something like Google's picasa even though it lacks features such as text overlay and specific image resizing (sizes are preset, non-editable).

I'm accustomed to photoshop and always find myself frustrated with trying to perform simple tasks in GIMP. Not to mention all the dialogs dogpiling on each other. Windows (the OS interface) is cluttered enough without all those damn subwindows!

Google's PICASA does pretty much all you mentionned. Go give it a try, It's free and it's very good.

Based on the way Picasa looks, compared with Apple's iPhoto, I'd guess A browser from Google would look something like Safari.

I was going to work a joke into this but nothing comes to mind.

You are very close. Go to http://images.google.com look at their new offering, an image search application for windows computers called Picasa. It integrates with a one-to-one chat program/P2P called Hello so you can share the pictures and discuss them online. I can't figure out where the profit comes in except the the language for the download of Hello says "try Hello for free" which might indicate a little pusher-mentality "here kiddies I have something that will make you feel good, would you like a taste?"

An OS is more than nifty apps, but they seem to be rolling out a lot more apps recently. Actually these look like purchases or perhaps Google is doing a little Angelling with their cash.

Google owns Hello. This is a photo-oriented IM client that they got along with Picasa, the (excellent) iPhoto knockoff.

I hope everyone who just said Google doesn't care about IM kicks themself in the head. You dumbasses.

Hello is pretty, & it works with Blogger & Picasa. It is good Windows software, which is all that Google seems to be interested in for the desktop.

It seems that, while ad revenue has made Google what it is, ad revenue can not be the company's only source of income forever. They have to expand into other areas. Everything they do seems to be based on the expansion of their ad revenue (i.e. - GMail, Froogle, etc.). They also bought they recently bought Picasa, so where else will they expand and how will they make money doing it?

Google recently acquired Picasa http://www.picasa.com/content/download.php?promo=h pp1 And one of the main features of Picasa is the ability to organize images by time and create timelines of images. See http://www.picasa.com/content/learn_more.php? for mor info.

Google recently acquired Picasa http://www.picasa.com/content/download.php?promo=h pp1 And one of the main features of Picasa is the ability to organize images by time and create timelines of images. See http://www.picasa.com/content/learn_more.php? for mor info.

They may also start leveraging the success of popular services that use their Web APIs , such as Google Alert and Copyscape , particularly with the commercialization of Google Alert. Positioning themselves as a general technology platform for the web is surely a step in the right direction to further raising their valuation.

Will be interesting to see how quiet they stay from now till the actual IPO...

Whoops - to fast on the draw. They've only eliminated the link to the forums. They're still available at this link.

A click on the support link will take you to a Picasa FAQ, and within, you will find a page that lists a large number of keyboard shortcuts.

Enjoy, in moderation.

One thing to note before rushing out to grab this thing: Picasa requires a mailing address and CC number to create an account (haven't looked into what the CC number is for, but I'm guessing the software is free but the service isn't). Since the address is no doubt meant to be a billing addr for the CC then you may not be able to just enter bogus values and according to their privacy policy they explicitly reserve the right to spam you (paper and electronic) and to sell your data to others. You can unsubscribe (link is in the priv policy) but it's strictly opt-out.

I'm a little disapointed in this as, despite all the hoopla about gmail and such, Google is usually good about at least not spamming and/or sharing the data they collect.

On that note, one more point: there've already been a couple of threads about Google/Gmail and the privacy armeggedon that some still seem to think they represent. I'd be interested in getting feedback on this piece that I wrote on the subject. Thanks.

The website doesn't tell you much, or have any screenshots or a tour etc.

If you'd clicked the support link, you'd find a link to the tour. (Requires flash)

Then, why do they buy a company that produces windows only software ? Shouldn't they go for multiplatform / opensource software ? Isn't this Sun's and IBM's and Novell's strategy ?

Very true - or the Picasa folks who just got bought by google!

We're working on some stuff. Soon, very soon, you'll hear of it. ;)