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."

Comments

Picasa 2 is the best photo program I have used

[chrisgeleven]

It is:

1) Easy to use
2) Extremely fast (even when applying effects)
3) Powerful

Very rarely does a program combine all three of those and not feel like a bloat piece of junk. Picasa does it all.

It can easily print photos or you can upload/order prints online.

You can even export photos to a web page (even save as XML format!).

It has a cool feature called "I'm Feeling Lucky" (get the Google reference) that automatically adjusts everything from color to contrast to redeye. It has worked virtually flawless for me so far on a select number of photos that I have had a chance to play along with and if there is an issue, the undo takes a second (if that) to return to the original.

Simply amazing. Best part, it is free :)

Slick

[Sunspire]

Picasa 1.2 made me kick Adobe Album 2.0 out, the software I was using previously to organize photos. The speed of the Picasa interface is something you have to try for yourself, it runs like a greased weasel. Adobe Album behaves like it's downloading the images as progressive jpegs from the net in comparison, you can see the gradual redraws of the image when you open the edit mode.

Now Picasa 2.0 comes along, and it is at least at easy to use and fast as 1.2. It also fixes my number one problem with these organizers, that the program's internal organization is not reflected on the disk, only in some metadata. That just doesn't cut it in real life when you're working with multiple programs. I bet Adobe will start to give away their Album software for free soon, I just don't see who would want to buy it when Picasa is simply better, faster and free.