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Picasa 2.0 Released, Reviewed
firebirdy writes "Google's Picasa 2.0 was announced yesterday (with support for RAW, Gmail integration, and uploading to popular photo services, among other things) and PC Magazine is ready with a review. Four and a half stars, and the only drawback found by PC Magazine folks was the lack of support for handheld devices."
System Requirements
Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0+
Picasa 2 is available in English only.
I used picasa 1 extensively and it was mainly a picture cataloging program - which it handled most excelently. Picasa 2 has all of those great features, plus picture touch-up features. For photo management, I give it 5 stars.
http://www.picasa.com/
I've always been a bit unsure how Picasa fits into Google's philosophy. I mean, they're all about searching, locating relevant things, organisation of data etc, right? Now I think Picasa is a decent piece of software - although the first version was a tad slow and occasionally unstable, I'm willing to give it a second try. But in terms of organisation of data, it doesn't really offer much. You can't put pictures into more than one group, for example.
Surely the best thing would be actual image search. In other words, I give the program a picture of my face and say 'find all the other pictures with this face'. That's an extreme example and would be incredibly complex, of course, but some kind of actual picture searching capability would be amazingly useful.
Like I say, this isn't an anti-Picasa troll because it's a decent piece of software, but it doesn't seem to be offering anything amazingly new.
apterous.org
The Effects tools are great. Nice easy ways to fix brightness, highlights, shadows etc. This will fix most problems people have with photos. One wicked cool tool is the Filtered B&W. And you thought desaturate was how to make B&W pics...
Problems. The Sharpeness tool is lacking and things become corse and grainy really quick. Almost all digital cameras benefit from some sharpenging, but here its below average and needs work. The only other glaring fault is the red eye tool zooms out and makes it harder to select eyes, not easier. It does work well though so its not all bad. I just wish it was easier to select people's eyes.
Overall though a really nice consumer photo organizer and light editor app. Hell for $40 it would be a nice app. I'm impressed that they addressed some of the shortcomings from the old version and kept it free and of course Slick feeling and looking. No need to be jealous of IPhoto anymore. Nice job Google.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
It's free as in 100% free. No ads, no trial, nothing but free.
I used to be a huge fan of iPhoto but I found as my collection grew, I outgrew iPhoto. Picase stepped in for me exactly when I needed it. Picasa1 needed some work with stability. I picked up 2 as soon as it became available and have found myself completely impressed and satisfied with Picasa2 so far. The interface is easy to understand and the enhancement tools rival those in for-pay software like Photoshop Elements. It may even replace GIMP 2.2 for simple tasks on my laptop. Google seems to have the same ethic of Apple in the "make it work" category. Add in the Blogger and Hello integration and you have a superior and free for now piece of software. If only Digikam can catch up.
-- As it was eXtraheavy in the beginning, is now and forever shall be
However, it insists on connecting to their stats server no matter what, I blocked it from the firewall, the installer went dead :|
Click on the export button. It is all in there, even the ability to export to XML.
I've not used Picasa, but from the tour it seems like it is pretty similar. Some nice features of Picasa:
* Keeps pictures in place. iPhoto puts them all in one directory structure, which some people don't like. I've been using a program that lets you keep mutliple iPhoto libraries so I don't have that problem.
* Comments go into IPTC fields. Don't think iPhoto does that, but it's a good idea.
* Lets you print a poster by slitting image across multiple pages.
It is better than the current iPhoto in terms of editing tools, but about the same compared to iPhoto 5 (due out next week I think, if not already). Also, the new iPhoto supports RAW files and I think has more export options. Basically iPhoto also benefits from the good integration with other iLife apps for making slideshow DVD's and such easier and more interesting - in that respect Picasa is more stand-alone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Picasa and iPhoto are very similar. Picasa allows users to break photos into albums and stores them in a library similar to iPhoto. The biggest benefit to Windows users is that it is a simple, clean, well written program for the Windows platform. This is a rare event. iPhoto has its flaws and drawbacks, but if you use it for what it is intended for it works rather well. Apple says that it will support 20,000+ photos, but if I had that many photos, I think I'd invest in a pro-level photo management system. The same goes for Picasa.
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
Well there are photo organizers for Linux out there. They aren't in the awesome category or as slick as Picassa but they work and you can manage and organize photos on Linux pretty easily.
P IP/rubriq ue.php3?id_rubrique=3
I know its not completely done but have you even looked at F-spot? http://www.gnome.org/projects/f-spot/
how about gThumb
http://gthumb.sourceforge.net/
or digiKam
http://digikam.sourceforge.net/Digikam-S
Compared to what the older version of Picassa offered these aren't so aweful. Pre 2.0 Picassa sucked for image enhancement and only had a nice visual experience going for it. Its not like its organizational tools were very good so I don't know why you were so hung up on having it for Linux. With 2.0 yes, Linux users should be jealous, but pre that I thought it was just average with a gimmicky but fun timeline feature.
Anyway, the picasa people did say to post if you wanted a Linux version of it. This is at there forums, so drop by and add to the "Picassa for Linux" thread http://forums.picasa.com/viewforum.php?f=1 Maybe they'll actually listen?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
But I'm supposed to believe that Photoshop is one of the best web browsers ever? Please...
(Picasa is supposed to organize your photos, not edit them. Editing is just a side feature that they added in case you're too lazy to open up Gimp. So, Picasa us a crappy photo editing program, but it's pretty good at organize pictures. Good at what it's designed for, sucks at what it's not)
I found an article that highlighted some of the hits and misses in Picasa.
Click
I agree mostly with the lacking of a hierarchical labeling system being a miss.
Also, I've used iPhoto a fair amount and I find Picasa a bit easier to use.
However, I'm hoping that the updated iPhoto will do better.
Right click one of your albums on the left side and then choose "Make a Webpage" no harder than that :)
Have you metaroderated recently?
- As several people have pointed out, it's highly indiscriminate. You can tell it what folders you do and don't want it indexing, but doing this is an awkward process, and setting up anything but their defaults (i.e., basically index 'My Pictures' or index everything) will take too much doing for anyone with a heavily-populated system. It might be okay for indexing photos on your grandparents' machine, but it probably won't be okay for the stereotypical
/. reader's (Windows) computer.
- Nonstandard interface. It looks to me like they're shooting for an OSX look and feel, which is all well and good but just comes out looking goofy under Windows. The right-side scroll bar is a particularly egregious example, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the traditional, predictable Windows look and feel.
- It's an image cataloguer; it's not an image viewer, which seems a strange distinction to make, especially for an application that lets you view images. There's no 'Browse with Picasa' option for folders from Windows Explorer, and no means of associating Picasa as a viewer for image file types, so you're stuck with using the 'Picasa Explorer' (which offers no treeview, for instance, just a flat look at all your image folders) as your browser.
- I understand and appreciate that the image editor isn't meant to be very full-featured, just a basic picture tuner; but there are still some bizarre omissions, most notably the lack of any available resize option (that I could find).
I don't doubt that there are people who will find Picasa a godsend, but it does virtually nothing I want to do, and everything it does do it takes a clunky approach to. It gets in the way far too often for me to ever imagine it as a power-user app.Here's a direct download link to Picasa 2 Enjoy!
Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths....
The single most useful feature sounds similar to the "KeyWords" feature mentioned above. It's got a few predefined categories, but will let you define your own, and that combined with using EXIF data, will let you very easily (once the pics have been categorized) do things like: Show me all pictures taken in Norway on July 9th.
It doesn't care about the folder structure (you point it to a "root", like /mediafile/photos), has some pretty decent "Export to HTML album" and some rudimentary editing capabilities. (uses KIPI plugins).
Picasa does NOT store your pictures in a database!
Picasa does NOT move your pictures around by itself.
It does rip a database of thumbnails for fast scrolling.
Even all of the edits are non-descructive! (Come back a week later and undo your crop/rotate/adjust highlights.) They are super careful about that.
The GPL is written to allow internal modifcation and use without requiring release of your modifications, but it seems this allowance is based on the belief that a piece of software used on a foreign machine can never monopolize a market segment. But what if all the applications are network-based?
The GNU General Public License version 3 will provide an option, apparently letting a distributor require a user who "publicly performs" a modified program, such as by offering it as a public web service, to publish the modified source code at cost.
That was the main reason I didn't use the earlier version of Picasa as well. Just trying 2.0 very briefly so far, I haven't found files dropped all over the place yet. So the database appears to be more centralized. It does create a file or two when you edit a photo however, along with a hidden folder containing the original file. Nice for restoring, but I like to keep the directories neat, for use with other programs.
I didn't dislike Picasa 2.0 (it works and it's simple) but I still miss things:
w|m