Slashdot Mirror
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."
Picture management is about all I use windows for these days and I have been through every last source forge solution and they all suck compared to picassa.
Yes, I know it's comparing Windows vs. Mac.
Actually, I love Picasa exactly because of what it has that you don't think it has. See, it _is_ possible to categorize pictures in multiple categories. You can't put them in multiple albums, but when you highlight a media file (not just a picture -- read below) and hit ctrl-K, you get a list of keywords you can associate with it, and then easily search for all media files with the same keywords later.
This was actually the feature that sold me on Picasa. See, my problem was that at last count, my laptop had about 25Gb of porn on it, in a whole bunch of video files. I wanted to be able to categorize my porn in ways that would allow me to slice-and-dice my collection -- show me all gay porn, say, or all het porn, or all porn that involves swallowing, etc. I had taken an awkward first step by putting the media files into folders, but that ran into that whole "hard to have a media file in more than one folder" (on Windows, where symlinks/hardlinks are not really all that useful) problem. So great, but what happens when I want to see all videos where Gwen Summers swallows? Hard to do.
Picasa solves this problem elegantly and beautifully for me. I'm very happy with it.
[Sigh. Since this is Slashdot and everyone thinks you're kidding if you talk seriously about porn, I should note I'm entirely serious. In fact, before I found Picasa I attempted to submit an 'Ask Slashdot' about how other people categorize their porn collection, but it got rejected as a troll]
They state that you can add captions to your pictures that will be embedded into the files. You can then google-like search through the captions. I agree that picture search would be better, but maybe they are getting to that.
I think they are trying to get more inroads into any type of data, and pictures are a huge aspect. The nice integration with hello.com and blogger.com seems to show that they are in that direction.
I would think that with all of the features they put in there they could throw in an HTML gallery creator. I have a ton of pics of my kids that I put on the web via some other software rather painstakingly, but if Picasa did this it would make things easier...a simple template-able multi-page gallery with FTP "one-click" publishing....(not "proprietary-blogger publishing")
Seriously, what you've described is the basic problem addressed by any information management system. The fact that it involves photos or video is a bit of red herring. I used programs written in DBaseII to solve this kind of problem (for a vastly different domain...) twenty years ago. I find it hard to believe that the state of the art hasn't progressed until the Picasa showed up.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
Hello (http://hello.com/) is really good for sharing pictures with complete idiots like your mom and dad. It automatically shrinks and recompresses the jpgs and lets you chat on the side. Great for my parents on dialup since it saves bandwidth, and if you want you can always selectively download the full image version from a few of the pics you are looking at. I havn't seen much else that is as easy and simple as Hello, but I havn't really looked for much. Email or ICQ or posting pictures on a webpage just don't cut it though.
Morphing Software
Do GIMP or Photoshop even pretend to be photo sharing tools?
Linux support is unlikely as Picasa has a long history on Windows and is targeted towards grandparents. Portability was probably not a consideration.
Mac support? Nobody is going to use this instead of iPhoto.
I installed it using Plain Olde Truly Free Wine (i.e.: not xover office) and most of it works. It is better than, say, gthumb.
Two gthumbs up for that!
Mark
I've been a happy user of Thumbs Plus for photo cataloguing/management, but I might want to migrate to Picasa. The trouble is, how do I migrate my existing database (keywords + comments) to Picasa?.. Anyone know the format of their database?.. I could export Thumbs Plus database in Access format, but if I can't hammer it somehow into Picasa, migrating wouldn't be an option...
Just one more step towards Google's domination of the world.
See today's LA times for a look into Google's "make/buy cool stuff and give it away" methodology:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google18jan1 8,0,2075292.story
I didn't like the name the first day, but after that it grew on me. At least it's original. When this product was introduced it essentially created a new category (photo organizers) in software -- ACDSee was one of very few pre-existing products that supposedly does the same thing (on Winders).