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

I wish they'd release a linux version

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I wish they'd release a linux version

[Dani Filth]

Have you tried KDE's digiKam? It lets you setup photo albums, add metadata, export to HTML, etc.

Re:I wish they'd release a linux version

[bogie]

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.

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-SP IP/rubriq ue.php3?id_rubrique=3

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?

Re:I wish they'd release a linux version

[pair-a-noyd]

I wish there was something for Linux that would allow me to select a range of pictures and print them catalog style. I remember a M$ prog called Thumbsplus that would do that, I think they called them "Contact Sheets" or something like that.

As it stands now, there are some good viewers, I like GQview which is an included extra with most distros.
It's really handy. Not perfect for for general viewing it does the job. Complaints: no printing ability, extremely limited image manipulation ability, but as a simple viewer, very good..

If I want to print multiple photos on a single page I have to import them into OO which is not on my list of fun things to do...

Re:I wish they'd release a linux version

[MAdMaxOr]

In your situation, I'd use Flickr.

Re:I wish they'd release a linux version

[SkjeggApe]

Try Kimdaba http://ktown.kde.org/kimdaba/
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).

Re:I wish they'd release a linux version

[humuhumunukunukuapu']

i prefer digikam to picasa, personally.

Re:I wish they'd release a linux version

[moonbender]

For what it's worth, Windows XP does that - and really quite well - out of the box. The image viewer (which might be based on the MS app you mention) is really a standalone application but seamlessly integrated into the explorer. Does everything from scaling and rotating to fit a full page to printing a folder's contents as thumbnails. Quite convenient especially since I only print photos/images every once in a while, spending time on getting a standalone solution would be overkill.

Re:I wish they'd release a linux version

[Sheridan]

Xnview will print contact sheets, and is available for Linux (and Windows).

(One caveat: I haven't tried the contact sheets under Linux, but I use it all the time as an image browser there.)

It is freeware for non-commercial use (although not opensource).

Cheers,
Mark

Re:I wish they'd release a linux version

[wuonm]

For Linux I like albumshaper Specially to generate web albums (with XML + XSL + Themes)
I didn't dislike Picasa 2.0 (it works and it's simple) but I still miss things:

• Linux version
• Advanced mode interface (access to EXIF data for instance)
• Album and collection oriented classification (two levels)
• Comment and tags on photo areas (auto detecting human heads)
• Integration with popular blogging software (MT, WP, etc) not only blogger
• More date related auto classification features (detecting and grouping photos in different time ranges: hours, days, etc)
• L10n
• In addition to tags additional ways of stablishing relation between pictures
• Import from Internet
• Be faster

Re:I wish they'd release a linux version

[Cassanova]

You could also try KimDaBa here

AWESOME

[Anonymous Coward]

System Requirements

Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0+
Picasa 2 is available in English only.

Re:AWESOME

[acvh]

System requirements were the first thing I looked for: Windows AND IE. Too bad.

I use a Mac, and don't really like iPhoto. I wish it was iTunes for pictures, but it isn't. I'll stick to folders with names like, "2005017", for now.

Re:AWESOME

[chrisgeleven]

Picasa respects what browser you have as your default. It has already launched Firefox several times when I clicked on something that launches a web browser.

Re:AWESOME

[Anonymous Coward]

Picasa 2 and your default browser

Q: Picasa 2 system requirements state the you need to have Internet Explorer. I use a different browser. What can I do?

A: You do not have to set Internet Explorer as your default browser to use Picasa 2. You must have Internet Explorer installed for Picasa to install and run smoothly. Most operations in Picasa 2 that call for a web browser will still bring up your default web browser, whether you are using Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera.

Re:AWESOME

[gl4ss]

yes. but the way they put it means that they're using it for internal things, like rendering.

but.. now that i'm installing it.

wtf is up with this? it gives 2 choices. completely scan my harddrives for pictures OR just scan desktop, my documents and my pictures. hmm. where's the 3rd option "let me choose what to scan"..

so now it's scanning through 250 gigabytes of crap rather than just the 3 gigabytes that i wanted.

Re:AWESOME

[Agret]

Maybe they say you need IE so that you won't try and download it with Microsoft Word?

Re:AWESOME

[EvilAlien]

If it doesn't scan your whole harddrive, how are we supposed to be able to search for stuff we want that you might have?

Re:AWESOME

[Curtman]

I gave it a try with Wine, and it almost works. The pictures just never get added once you click the Finish button, and the import a whole folder thing doesn't work at all. Oh well.

Re:AWESOME

[Anonymous Coward]

Great philosophy. Why don't you just go ahead and remove all of Windows, then?

Re:AWESOME

[That's Unpossible!]

No no no no no no ... not your DUAL BOOT system!

Heavens no!

Anyway, on my single boot system, Picasa will stay. I'll let you know when I start browsing the web with Picasa 2.0.

Re:AWESOME

[burns210]

Good thing you made a rash decision. Because all those Picasa-based porn sites that install activex contrlols really get to you.

Why are you even running windows if you have such a hatred for an integrated system program?

Virtually all IE vulnerabilities are accessed by going to a hacked site or similar. Picasa doesn't do that. How could it? Beyond which, adjusting your security settings absolves you of most problems anyway.

Sure, it is fun to bash microsoft, I have done it too. But don't be stupid about it, there are ways to improve security on any system, and Piscasa on Windows is no different.

Re:AWESOME

[tepples]

Then just use OSX and Linux and shut up.

How do you know the "dual boot machine" isn't a Mac mini switch-hitting Yellow Dog Linux and Mac OS X Panther?

Re:AWESOME

[pixel.jonah]

then just have it do the minimum scan on install, and then tell it what you want it to ignore, scan once, or watch under Tools > Folder Manager...

Problem Solved.

Re:AWESOME

[magefile]

IE is only sorta a requirement. You need it to install (part of the GUI or sth.), but then it respects your default browser choice (say, Firefox or Opera).

Re:AWESOME

[Jugalator]

It looks like Google is losing their focus and Google is thinking that the only way to compete with MS is to offer similar products as MS on MS-Only platforms.

Microsoft has no picture management tool like this.

Microsoft had no desktop search tool at the time Google released theirs.

What more Google software on Windows are you referring to?

Re:AWESOME

[maxpublic]

Most operations in Picasa 2 that call for a web browser will still bring up your default web browser, whether you are using Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera.

Now if only Gmail would support Opera. Wonder how bloody long that's going to take....

Max

Re:AWESOME

[onewing]

Not sure if your intrested in running a beta, but... there is a beta version that does work with gmail.

Just remember to choose "sign in anyways".

Re:AWESOME

[SilkBD]

Could it be that the IE object on Windows makes it VERY easy to create software with browser functionality?

I don't know if there's any SIMPLE and EASY way to obtain browser functionality in Linux... but on Windows, clearly the IE object makes sense.

They're not tryting to create a browser, afterall...

Re:AWESOME

[SilkBD]

I agree with the parent. There's a lot of advantages Windows has over Linux/Mac, not the least of which is a respectable software library.

I'm not a MS fanboi, but the software I use on Windows works and works well. Much of the software integrates well with other software packages I may need. I get to play the best games WHEN they come out... and finally I don't have to worry so much about what hardware I get because it will all work and more often than not without wrestling with configurations.

So, congratulations on your semi-lack of microsoft life... now stfu.

Re:AWESOME

[AstroDrabb]

The Mozilla/Firfox gecko engine is just as easy to embed. In fact, there is an exact COM interface to Gecko under MS Windows. That means you can drop the Gecko engine in place of the IE engine without changing any code.

If IE wasn't such a POS security hole, I wouldn't think it is a bad idea to use the IE engine in apps. However, there have been better alternatives for some time now.

Re:AWESOME

[gl4ss]

yeah. problem solved POST first install.

it didn't really tell that "you can change this later to any directories you want".

Re:AWESOME

[burns210]

You are right. Adjusting security does help, but only to an extent. My apologies for sounding like such an asshole, in my original post.

I think my real question is, why would you think Picasa is effected by these issues. I have yet to really use it, to be honest, but just because it uses IE doesn't mean that it will be susceptible to the lastest exploit simply because the latest exploit cannot be executed through picasa (Picasa doesn't visit a rogue site, doesn't deal with cookies for random sites, etc, etc).

Re:AWESOME

[AstroDrabb]

Remember that GDI+ exploit? Any program that used it _could_ be exploited. That didn't mean it would. For example, I had to download patches for MS Office 2003 and .Net. The chances of someone using MS Office to take advantage of the exploit were slim, however it could have still be an attack choice.

I am not against integrated systems. I just think that developers still using/embedding IE into their apps are silly. Everyone knows of the tons of problems that IE has had. There are plenty of other ways to get a browser core into an application. The Gecko engine can be embedded just like IE and in fact, the Gecko engine has an identical COM interface to the IE interface. Switching between the two requires zero recoding.

The other thing bugging me is that I would like to see Google do more cross-platform development and include Linux and Mac OS at targets for their desktop tools. Google certainly have enough good developers to do it.

Re:AWESOME

[NaDrew]

there is a beta version that does work with gmail.

... which has been supplanted by a new 8.0 beta. Opera seem to have decided to skip 7.6 in favor of jumping to 8.0.

compared to picasa 1......

[pbranes]

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.

Re:compared to picasa 1......

[magefile]

The export as XHTML feature is especially nice ... it exports a folder full of pics as a photo gallery in XHTML and CSS. Very nicely done, and makes it easy to modify with python (which I'm doing now for a photo archive of an old building that just got torn down).

AND ... they fixed the one bug I saw. Used to be, the width didn't have a closing '"' on the blown-up picture page. That was the first thing I checked with 2.0, and it's fixed.

Re:Whats Picasa?

[douthitb]

http://www.picasa.com/

Picasa vs. iPhoto?

[Gogo Dodo]

Does anybody have an opinion on how Picasa fares against iPhoto?

Yes, I know it's comparing Windows vs. Mac.

Re:Picasa vs. iPhoto?

[Anonymous Coward]

iDon't.

Re:Picasa vs. iPhoto?

[ztirffritz]

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.

Re:Picasa vs. iPhoto?

[Vroem]

If you can't make a photo book, grandma is never gonna use it.

Re:Picasa vs. iPhoto?

[IpalindromeI]

Since you're apparently too young to know the difference, or have never used a *nix system, let me explain ^H and ^W to you. In the old days, improperly configured terminals happened often. If your terminal was not configured properly, the Backspace key might not be interpreted correctly, and the terminal would display ^H instead of removing the previous character. The control code ^W is/was used to remove all characters back to the last whitespace, ie the previous word.

So what you've just punned is effectively:

Well Windows...

Picasa

[mistersooreams]

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.

Re:Picasa

[LiquidCoooled]

Baby steps :)
I think google is on the right path with the images, we just got to give them time to find their way with it.

Re:Picasa

[CrankyFool]

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]

Re:Picasa

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Picasa

[lewiscr]

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like a laptop isn't the best porn delivery device...

Re:Picasa

[CrankyFool]

My desktop has the larger archive, but the work laptop is the computer I always have with me, so I carry a ... representative sample? Is that a good term? with me.

Re:Picasa

[Daniel Ellard]

A lot of people are probably googling for "Gwen Summers" right now...

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.

Re:Picasa

[CrankyFool]

Oh, certainly. I was dealing with SQL database structures to deal with this a few years back when I had to figure out how to make it so I could put my (non-porn :) ) DVD and literature in multiple categories. I could have done the same here, but then I'd have needed to put a decent interface on it, and ... frankly, the reason I run a Windows laptop is that I'm lazy and don't want to have to deal with this. Picasa's pretty much the only tool that has made it easy to do this sort of stuff. There might have been others, mind you, but I couldn't find them.

Re:Picasa

[lewiscr]

I was thinking more of... sanitary... issues.

Re:Picasa

[Matt Perry]

It'd be nice to have the kind of multi-categorization for bookmarks.

Re:Picasa

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you're not suggesting that a Palm device would be more suitable?

Re:Picasa

[Anonymous Coward]

porn = sin

pls stop 4 ur sake thx

Re:Picasa

[mrchaotica]

Heh, that's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to Mac OS X Tiger. I don't want to mix my porn with the rest of the pictures in my iPhoto library (for obvious reasons), so I'm really looking forward to the "Smart Folders" feature of Spotlight. It'll fix the "hard to have a media file in more than one folder" problem quite well -- and I can easily store the whole collection in an encrypted disk image too.

Re:Picasa

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be more concerned about...

'TEENAGERS and young men should keep their laptops off their laps because they could damage fertility, an expert said today.

'"Laptops, which reach high internal operating temperatures, can heat up the scrotum which could affect the quality and quantity of men's sperm.

'"The increase in scrotal temperature is significant enough to cause changes in sperm parameters," said Dr Yefim Sheynkin, an associate professor of urology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.'

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page /0,5478,11636712%255E1702,00.html

Re:Picasa

[mrchaotica]

That's more work than waiting for Smart Folders. Nice to know it's possible, though.

Re:Picasa

[pixel.jonah]

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

Re:Picasa

[chthonicdaemon]

Maybe you want imgSeek. works great for what you suggest, as well as being able to "draw your own".

Re:Picasa

[danila]

TBH, other programs had categories. ACDSee had (and has) categories, so that you can easily see all images that are located in C:\Oops and subfolders, D:\Lalala and subfolders, E:\New\More\Extra and subfolders, were made in 2003 and belong to categories A, B and F. Of course, ACDSee is a resource hog, slow as hell (with constant multi-second delays on routine operations such as selecting a photo) and has an unfriendly interface. There is only one feature there that I miss in other viewers - thumbnails on folders.

Still, Picasa (even Picasa 1) is great. As for the state of the art, for the last 20 years there was no compelling need for powerful data organising software, because there was little data on most consumer machines. Digital cameras became popular only a couple years ago.

Re:Picasa

[Daniel Ellard]

As for the state of the art, for the last 20 years there was no compelling need for powerful data organising software, because there was little data on most consumer machines.

There's been a heck of a lot of data that needs to be organized on non-"consumer" machines, however! The amount of data you're talking about should be measured in instances, not megabytes. The fact that a digital photo is more than a thousand times larger than an invoice or a patient record or what have you doesn't make it more difficult to manage -- it just makes the hard drive manufacturers happier.

Very few people have a million photos they need to manage. Very few moderate-sized businesses have fewer than a million records they need to organized in a bunch of different ways.

It's not the data management -- it's the GUI.

Re:Picasa

[sl*shdot]

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.

Re:Picasa

[Ed Avis]

I used ACDSee a few years ago and it seemed pretty quick. Perhaps it has bloated since then. Are there good image viewers on Windows? (Preferably free as in speech, but I'll settle for beer.)

Re:Picasa

[glyph42]

I've always been a bit unsure how Picasa fits into Google's philosophy. [...] Surely the best thing would be actual image search.

This one should be obvious... they want everyone to put comments on their images, and upload a bunch of them. Suddenly Google has an enormous library of annotated images to train their upcoming image search tools on. Mark my words, they'll have content-based image search long before Microsoft.

Re:Picasa

[danila]

You'll have to settle for free as in "stolen TV set". :) There are no great viewers, but there are some decent ones.

First, there is very little innovation. Most free viewers are extremely simple (folder tree, filelist/thumbnails and the image) and so are useless to anyone with more than a few directories of pictures. I remember when I had a 286 I only had a few tens of GIF photos that I got through floppynet and which were mainly intended to showcase the brilliant quality of the EGA display. :) For those times a simple viewer such as PV or QPV were ok.

But if you have a lot of images, which includes personal photos (different categories, such as your own ones which you need organised, those of your relatives that you don't care about, random photos, such as 50 images of something/someone that were taken simply because with a digital camera you can, etc.), porn, funny pics, useful pics, images for your software, websites, etc., then you can't really settle with a useless simple viewer.

There are some decent ones, but each has its problems. I like CompuPic, because it has good smooth scaling when resizing images both up and down (even the latest ACDSee apparently uses nearest neighbour or similar for upscaling, which is ridiculous). ACDSee 7 has some nice features, but is very bloated and sometimes (but not always) excruciatingly slow. Then there is ACDSee 3, which you can still probably find at oldversion.com, which is great and very fast, but lacks too many features to compete with modern viewers. Still, it's the default viewer for me.

There are some other monstrosities, such as ThumbsPlus, but most big viewers have poorly designed interfaces, many kinks that they haven't yet worked out, less than stellar performance and sometimes bad stability (ThumbsPlus crashes a lot).

There is also IrfanView, which is reportedly rather powerful and is freeware, but it has extremely bad interface with separate windows used and this really gets annoying, especially when you need to start up the viewer often.

These were general purpose viewers - programs designed in the 1990s that were simply intended to view graphics files.

Today you may need more features, particularly when managing photo albums. The problem is, though, that Picasa is probably the best product, but it still sucks. I just uninstalled Picasa 2, because I couldn't stand the crappy changes to the satisfactory design of Picasa 1 (and most problems of Picasa 1 not being addressed at all).

There are some decent offerings from Ulead and Adobe - they have wide product lines, including software with overlapping capabilities - image viewing, creating slideshows, adjusting images, editing them, etc. Still, I can't say I was satisfied with the viewing and managing parts of their offerings.

BTW, one simple program that I have no complaints about is the innovative PicaView (there are similar ones today), which displays a thumbnail in the context menu for graphics files in explorer and can display the full size image. But it can only perform this one function, even though it does it well.

As for OSS, the last time I checked there wasn't anything worth speaking about on Windows (and on Linux too). Haven't personally tried the iPhotos, but I don't expect it to be perfect either. Better then Picasa and ACDSee - may be, but not as good a program as I would like to have.

Re:Picasa

[Destoo]

the problem with current versions of ADCSee is that they also handle video..

So you either program a slideshow or hit pagedown on the viewer and it loads up the next media file. If it's a video with sound, it could take up to 20 seconds just to load it.

I haven't found a way to dissociate it from certain extensions, or to have the viewer skip non static images.

Then again, I just used the trial version.

Re:Picasa

[hoosier_geek]

I hadn't thought of this until you mentioned it. There's a shareware (Windows) program called DPeg! which is meant to search for duplicates and near duplicates, and it includes all sorts of actual image-comparison settings. I think you could probably make a cropped picture of someone's face, and with loose enough settings, Dpeg could probably find other images of that person if the face was in the same orientation. http://www.somewareonthe.net/index_dpeg.htm Interesting idea... -K

Re:Picasa

[Cyberfox]

Greetings,
I strongly recommend Firehand Ember. I've been using it for years and years, and it's fast, clean, functional, handles tens of thousands of files in a directory, gives a lot of useful options, scales with interpolation, slideshows, etc., etc...

I've given them a good bit of money over the years, but it's totally worth it. They also support thumbnails of folders, basically by grabbing the first image in the folder and putting it as a decoration on a folder graphic.

Take a look at it, it's free for demo use.

I'm just a very satisfied customer. I tried everything else out there, and loathed them (including acdsee), as they didn't present the majority of my images as thumbnails in the largest view portion. ThumbsPlus never worked right for me, but Firehand has never given me any problems.

-- CyberFOX

Re:Picasa

[danila]

Ember has some nice ideas and an a few interesting approaches to the interface, but it's not in a usable state right now. There are some completely unacceptable things in a viewer, such as

• sound effects that you can't turn off
  
• a toolbar in the fullscreen mode that you can't turn off
  
• no image scrolling in fullscreen mode
  
• no keyboard shortcut for up level in the browser
  
• it's fucking slow
  
• almost no extra options in the free version
  
• no downloadable demo of the full version

It's not even a contender for a title of good image viewer.

Love it

[CypherXero]

I love this software. I have thousands of digital photographs on my hard drive, and trying to find a picture is insanly difficult. Picasa made things MUCH easier, and Picasa 2 is looking to be even better.

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 :)

Re:Picasa 2 is the best photo program I have used

[aardwolf204]

Yes but it stores you pictures in a database, and I think it may have moved/changed my file structure once too. I'm afraid of anything that actually changes my files. Call me old school, but I'd rather have my MP3's organized in folders like Artist/album/song rather than anything like iTunes or Picasa. I know I cant be the only one either. This is the one thing that has always kept my away from apps like this. I guess when Longhorn comes along and the filesystem is replaced with SQL or something similar I'm going to finally have to give up on the good ol' file system organization... or move to linux

Re:Picasa 2 is the best photo program I have used

[Mr. Arbusto]

Not to jump on the defense of Apple bandwagon here, but iTunes is a good example of easy organization. By default is stores music in folders organized by Artist/Album/Song. The power comes from the ability to actually find something in a collection of 10,000 songs in under 3 seconds by knowing some of the information.

IIRC, WinFS has been removed from the Longhorn line up. Again something that lets you put your files where ever and indexes them when they are created or modified is useful. Better than the current method which is go through each folder one by one looking at each file.

Re:Picasa 2 is the best photo program I have used

[pixel.jonah]

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.

Just tried it

[bogie]

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.

Re:Just tried it

[Rich0]

One thing that I like about the effects is that it leaves the original data intact. You can go back and unapply an effect at any time, so no need to do a save-as at every step. If you export pictures, it applies the effects to the exported jpegs.

Also - while it doesn't prompt for jpeg quality settings when you save effects, it seems to err on the side of too much quality rather than too little - which I like. If I'm burning my photos to CD to have prints made, I don't want shots from my $300 camera compressed as if I were putting them on a floppy...

Re:Just tried it

[RonnyJ]

A great thing about this program is that any edits that you make to your pictures aren't actually written to the original file.

From the help file:

Picasa never saves over your original files, so you'll never ruin or damage a picture by editing it. Picasa preserves your original photo as a digital negative, so every edit you make is fully undoable. If you want to work with your edited pictures in other programs, you should export or save a copy of them.

For an average home user, this seems great, as it effectively stops somebody overwriting their original files with, say, a badly cropped version, and then later being unable to go back to the original as they've overwritten it. Any changes you make with Picasa don't affect the actual file, as it seems that it transparently applies the changes every time you load. The one downside of this is that you can't open the 'modifed' version in another program (without exporting it) but for an average user who just wants to do simple work on their own photos, it seems great.

Re:is it free?

[chrisgeleven]

It's free as in 100% free. No ads, no trial, nothing but free.

Great software.....but where's the web publishing?

[Stevarino]

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")

Picasa has spoiled me

[CheeseTroll]

I have grown quite spoiled by Picasa's export-to-web feature over the past couple of years. It's not perfect, but I can download pics from the camera, organize them, export them in a web-friendly format (thumbnails, navigation, etc.), and ftp the batch to my site for the grandparents to see, all in about 5 minutes. Sure beats the heck out of building the html myself.

My main gripe has been the disconnect between the album organization and actual filesystem structure, as it makes backups tricky. Sounds like the new export features should have this covered.

Thanks, Google!

Re:Picasa has spoiled me

[magefile]

There's a dedicated "backup" function in this. Just FYI. And even the old version (by which I mean Google's, as that was the first one I ever used) let you do backups, as long as you were OK with putting some HTML next to it ...

Re:Picasa has spoiled me

[Repugnant_Shit]

Does picasa allow you to caption the images when you make a web gallery?

Re:Picasa has spoiled me

[CheeseTroll]

It didn't before, for sure. The new version is supposed to be much better, though I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Sounds promising! This is what they say about it: 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.

Picasa "Thinks Differently"

[eXtra heavy]

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.

Re:Picasa "Thinks Differently"

[Gob Blesh It]

Google may have the same "make it work" ethic as Apple, but I've found Google's user interfaces to be on the mediocre side. Compare Gmail to Mail.app, for example, or Google Desktop Search to Tiger's Spotlight.

Did you ever find a suitable replacement for iPhoto on your Mac? I've read great things about iView Media, but it costs $50.

Re:Picasa "Thinks Differently"

[eXtra heavy]

I tried iView on XP and found it tried real hard to do what iPhoto does for free. I still use iPhoto on my Mac quite regularly but I really started to lean towards Picasa for a number of reasons, most specifically, the file management. I can tell Picasa where I want my files to go. iPhoto sort of takes over there and it always bothered me.

Re:Picasa "Thinks Differently"

[sxtxixtxcxh]

i love iview on the mac.

i think picasa rocks for what it does. i wish they'd come out with one for os x :p

iphoto couldn't handle my photo library, which is currently around 15 gigs. and it really started to choke when i got my eos300d.

Re:is it free?

[Harbinger_Of_Sorrow]

However, it insists on connecting to their stats server no matter what, I blocked it from the firewall, the installer went dead :|

Re:Great software.....but where's the web publishi

[chrisgeleven]

Click on the export button. It is all in there, even the ability to export to XML.

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.

Actual Image Search

[IEEEmember]

For an example of visual search see LTU Technologies product Image Seeker. They have a demo using the 65,000 corbis royalty free images.

Image-seeker is highly scalable server-side software.

Some thoughts

[SuperKendall]

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.

Turn any iPod into an iPod Shuffle in 3 easy steps

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mhusson/3253841

I suppose I could just install it...

[19thNervousBreakdown]

...but I don't have more than a couple seconds free at the moment.

The question I have is, can you export whatever structure you come up with to some easily-parseable format? This sounds like a great idea, but if they decide to charge for it down the road, or something better comes up, I don't want my data stuck in their program. Has anyone tried this out?

Re:I suppose I could just install it...

[chrisgeleven]

You can export to HTML or XML (which opens up a lot of possibilities I think with online gallery programs).

Re:Well, guess we know where their biases are

[Lehk228]

it's a photo organizer with touch-up tools, not a primary image editing app.

Picasa sucks, but Hellos is good

[Ark42]

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.

Re:Picasa sucks, but Hellos is good

[DarthWiggle]

Why on earth is this offtopic? Hello integration is a major feature of Picasa, and if the poster hates Picasa but loves Hello, surely that's relevant... Mods...

Re:Picasa sucks, but Hellos is good

[denjin]

I agree about offtopic being odd. But, the OP didn't exactly qualify his statement about Picasa sucking.

Re:Picasa sucks, but Hellos is good

[loyukfai]

complete idiots like your mom and dad

Is there no one going to say a word about this?

BTW, I thought he was to mean "computer idiot", that's a bit better though.

Re:Great software.....but where's the web publishi

[s7uar7]

You don't say what software you're currently using, but I can highly recommend JAlbum, a free java-based gallery creator. It has an integrated ftp client so could do what you're after.

Re:Great software.....but where's the web publishi

[Quill_28]

I don't know about one click ftp but there is a make web page option.

Porn = easy to find? NO.

[No Such Agency]

I want the porn on my computer to be HARD to find. That way nobody but me will find it.

I don't really want a visiting friend clicking on the wrong icon in my Start menu and having my midget bukkake collection spread out before them (neatly catalogued).

Re:What's in a name?

[reboot246]

Don't pee in mi casa, please.

Re:Well, guess we know where their biases are

[fsck!]

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.

Re:Well, guess we know where their biases are

[Boglin]

You actually mentioned the Photoshop? Bah! Photoshop is absolute crap compared to Mozilla. Photoshop can't handle Javascript, CSS, or even Gopher. Heck, it can't even set up a HTTPS connection. Even links can set up an HTTPS connection.

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)

Does it still drop files everywhere?

[freeweed]

I tried the earlier version when Google first released this, and while it was sorta nice, I really didn't like one feature: Picasa drops a file in every directory you have that has an image file in it. Let it spider your hard drive (which is one of the cooler things about it, I thought), and suddenly every directory has a mini-database in it.

This sort of behaviour drove me nuts with a certain Windows FTP client, but at least that could be turned off. Can you tell 2.0 to use a centralized database somehow?

Re:Does it still drop files everywhere?

[GreyedOut]

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.

Picasa vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2

[bazabba]

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.

Re:Picasa vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2

[FuzzzyLogik]

He says that you can add multiple labels to a Picasa picture or set of pictures... but you can only view one at a time. The labels are for quickly finding photos... you can hit Control+K to add "keywords" which will allow you to search for "birthday" and "son's name" as he did and get all those pictures.. Labels aren't a replacement for "tags" in adobe photoshop album or "keywords" in picasa. minor mistake but you're hardly expected to know how everythings works by using it for a day... Picasa does what he wanted it to do as far as organizing and tagging.. he just didn't know how to do it.

Re:Picasa vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2

[bazabba]

Thanks for the info! I actually found this out after playing with Picasa more. Now I'd like a burn-to-vcd/dvd feature that doesn't require a computer to play.

Re:Great software.....but where's the web publishi

[Agret]

Right click one of your albums on the left side and then choose "Make a Webpage" no harder than that :)

Re:is it free?

[magefile]

I call shenanigans. Didn't happen to me, and I have most incoming and outgoing ports blocked off.

omg, best photo organizer ever!

[PhiberOptix]

I've just given a try on the software (i had installed it when 1.0 came out, but was unimpressed by then, i don't remember why).
But i used it for like 30 minutes and its amazing. I always hated having to browse folders to look for pictures, and i don't have to do it anymore. I gave a quick glimpse on the effects panel, and the red eye remover is easy and very effective.

this is a really cool software. really.

ps. no, i don't work at picasa, google, or anywhere near US at all.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all the years of dotcommery, did we still not learn to ask 'Why?' when a company seems to give away valuable software for free?

Are they trying to hurt Microsoft or Apple?

Are they trying to endear themselves to a potential audience?

Will they be tying in all kinds of for-pay add-ins?

Also, this brings up something that's been bothering me: how much source code has Google contributed back to the OS community? Any? 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? A company that is building an entire suite of networked apps that always run on THEIR servers effectively sidesteps the GPL's requirements of participation in a source-sharing community. Clearly Google is a more honest company than most (Motto: Don't be evil.), but it's not a non-profit. Things to consider...

Question about Picasa

[Reality Master 101]

Can you share the albums across a home network? I have a bunch of pics and I use a program that I'm not totally happy with, but I need a program that can be used on two computers to access one shared set of pics (i.e., my computer has the pics, my wife's computer wants to look at them).

Anyone know?

Re:Question about Picasa

[yamcha666]

Sounds like Picasa's partner, Hello, might be what you're looking for.

Or Windows/Samba shares would be just as effective.

Re:Question about Picasa

[Phil246]

i did it by having one directory where pics are stored in, as a shared folder. then mapped that to a drive on the other computer and let picasa trawl through that on the other machine

Well, if I have to use windoze

[jcoxatonce]

At least somebody is making software for Windows that's as good as the iLife suite. Small wonder that it's Google doing it, too.

Better than iPhoto?

[Revvy]

I've seen comments here and elsewhere about Picasa being better than iPhoto in some or all ways. Until Picasa runs on my Mac, it's not even a contender.

You don't have to respect my bias, but at least you're aware of it.

Re:Better than iPhoto?

[usermilk]

I really wish they'd release a Mac version, but honestly it is great enough that I only use my PC to manage photos right now.

I keep importing photos onto my Mac in iPhoto for legacy reasons, but otherwise Picasa is where I am at.

Re:Better than iPhoto?

[IANAAC]

Well, look at it this way: iPhoto doesn't run on a PC either. So you end up with two different apps for two different platforms. If we had an equivalent app for Linux then we'd have all bases covered. We don't yet (that I'm aware of, although there are a couple that are trying).

It's never an all or nothing thing. Quit makeing it out to be the end of the world because the app isn't supported on your platform. Obviously you have a solution in iPhoto.

Re:I love google.

[digitalgimpus]

Me to... somewhat.

during that 1 week trial... I didn't even sleep.

I was flying around the world like Santa. I visited everyone.

From navigating the streets in North Korea, to my own home...

I was pathetic... but it was too cool.

Works With Wine

[snookerdoodle]

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

Re:Works With Wine

[nandhp]

I tried installing Picassa 1 on wine and it wouldn't install. I'll have to give it another try!

--
If you can't mod me nicely, don't mod me at all!

Re:Porn = easy to find? NO.

[burns210]

We call them passwords. That, and disabling the broken file security sharing and making others not be able to get to your documents.

Create a non-admin visitor/guest account for friends, leave your shit separate.

Re:What's happening to SlashDot ?

[focitrixilous P]

But it's google! We love google!

Google

[ReeprFlame]

Gogle really seems to be expanding into alot of different technologies recently. I'm not sure if they have a certain plan or are just trying to overall help people. Anyway, I think they are a company with good intentions. This Picasa seems like it can be very useful on top of Google's other technologies...

Re:What's in a name?

[icedcool]

See my mi casa... notice theres no p in it. Lets keep it that way.

Platform Independant Photo Management

[senzafine]

FotoFlix uses alot of "desktop-like" functionality embedded in the browser. Not just IE...but FireFox, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, ect.

I know it's web-based and you have to be online...but if you have a broadband connection then it shouldn't be an issue.

Re:Porn = easy to find? NO.

[Slayback]

See, that's the beauty of the new Picasa. You can easily password protect a collection or album, and hide it!

Re:is it free?

[imemyself]

Real nice, mature comment there. If that's actually your opinion then you should have the balls to stand by it and not post as anonymous coward.

Re:Well, guess we know where their biases are

[bwalling]

This is Slashdot. Please refrain from making sense.

A few issues I've found

[sixpaw]

Caveat: how I browse my images may not be how other people browse their images. That said, with about a day's worth of use I've found Picasa surprisingly annoying, to the point where I'll likely be uninstalling it from my PC soon. My biggest gripes:

• 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.

Re:A few issues I've found

[denjin]

Won't argue about most points, but it does work great for my mum.

As for resize, they do let you do it, but only during an export as far as I can tell.

Re:A few issues I've found

[Sebastian Jansson]

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.
I solved that problem by using Tweak UI so set the My Pictures -path to D:\Picures(wich is where i store my pictures as you can guess) and by mounting my other picture partition as a folder in D:\Pictures.
But I agree htat They could have made the task easier without making the UI much more complicated. Maybe somebody shuld mention that to the developers.

No PDF

[Dag Maggot]

Just trying it out now. Should make my life easier (as all things Googly do). My only qualm is that I don't see PDF thumbnails.

Direct Download Link to Picasa 2

[Xoo]

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

It is the cure

[adolfojp]

Picasa is part of the cure to my Mac Envy

Cheers,
Adolfo

the only gripe I had

[roror]

was rotating image by small angles. now that it's possible in picasa 2, I am using only picasa for all my image related activity.

Re:What's in a name?

[Man in Spandex]

I need picasa for my bunghole!

Migrating to Picasa from another photo mgmt suite?

[dnquark137]

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...

Re:is it free?

[athakur999]

It's no BS. As soon as I start the installer, my copy of Kerio Personal Firewall tells me it's trying to connect to 63.236.5.132.

Re:I Tried Picasa Last Time

[IANAAC]

I'm not familiar with your app, but the reason I've been using Picasa (previous and current versions) is because it neatly catalogs all my pictures with minimal input from me.

I didn't see that on your list of features.

Bow down

[op12]

Just one more step towards Google's domination of the world.

Still has problems with international characters

[ESqVIP]

It still whines when I try to create a keyword with an accent or a tilde, so I'm not using it yet.

It's a shame such a promising program can't support the simplest non-ASCII characters, let alone Unicode...

Re:Porn = easy to find? NO.

[tepples]

I want the porn on my computer to be HARD to find. That way nobody but me will find it.

No, you want it to be easy for you to find but hard for everyone else to find. That's easy: just use an encrypted partition and don't give out the passphrase.

That said, I know someone who collects non-pornographic amputee videos, preferring videos of people with high DAK (double above knee) amputations.

well, that solves one problem

[Trepidity]

Now what about the Windows-only problem?

Re:is it free?

[Lexicon]

It's only free for non-commercial use; from the License Agreement:

Non-Commercial Use Only

Picasa Software is made available to you for your non-commercial use only. This means that you may use it at work or at home. But you first need to obtain Google's permission if you want to sell the Picasa Software or any information, services, or software associated with or derived from it, or if you want to modify, copy (except as provided below), license, or create derivative works from the Picasa Software.

The way this is worded, it looks like any pictures you edit or store in it (which would be "information" "associated or derived" using the software) can't be sold or used for any for-profit purpose. This certainly doesn't match my definition of "100% free".

Wait for GNU GPL v3

[tepples]

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.

Impressive

[cepler]

I tried earlier revisions and one frustration for me was it didn't support the Canon RAW (CRW) format from my Canon 10D digital SLR. Well, surprise surprise, I tired it out and it was off indexing my desktop and low and behold I see my RAW files start popping in. WOOT! It also indexed my variou movie clips and makes it easy to have'em all handy and play from in the program. For a free piece of software for Windows platform users, I gotta say, I'm very impressed so far!! My desktop will likely never go outside of Windows, maybe to OSX, 'cause I need Photoshop, Gimp ain't gonna cut it.

Great job Google/Picasa team!

Dumb Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible to keep the entire installer on your Hard Disk? What you download appears to be a stub to the full installer over the network.

That's all well and good, but I'd like to have it saved on disk in case I need to reinstall and I lose the link.

Does anyone know of the full download?

Re:Dumb Question

[sseremeth]

I'm fairly certain that _is_ the whole installer. It's just over 3 MB.

Good to know...

[SuperKendall]

I looked all over the site but could find no mention of supported formats - I figured if it didn't say RAW the chances of it being supported were rather slim!

Re:Good to know...

[Gogo Dodo]

I discovered the Support Page lists the supported file types:

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

Re:Good to know...

[jersey_emt]

Awesome. I shoot all my photos in RAW format (.CRW).

what a horrible idea

[Lord Bitman]

isnt one of google's greatest strengths the ability to rank things based on how real people are talking about it? ("how" meaning "the fact that").
Greatest strengths can often be the greatest weakness as well. It's not good to plug the weakness by getting rid of the strength entirely.
This will help the sites which use these tags, good for google for providing an "opt-out" to get rid of spammers.
But this will only serve to hurt google, it seems. Spammers will simply move to other sites, and google loses some of the legitimate posts to go with it. Many places, I can only assume, earned their high rankings by having people actually talking about how good they are. Where the fuck else would common people talk about this stuff? Doesnt this break the entire ranking-by-link system concept?

Now if google had a way to eliminate dead-ends when searching for an answer, that would be great :) ("Register now to see the answer!", "I have that same problem, no clue.", "No, dont know what you're talking about", "This is the wrong board to ask that question", etc)

come on, scientists! :)

Where Picasa fits.

[fm6]

I mean, they're all about searching, locating relevant things, organisation of data etc, right?

Searching, yes, locating, yes, organizing, big fat no. Their core business is helping you find information on the most disorganized collection of data in human history: the Web.

I'm not sure I'm a Picasa fan. Like you, I want to categorize and organize, and Picasa isn't particularly good at that. But it is good at simply finding things. During its automatic search, it turned up directories of old photos I was sure I'd lost. And I found them because Picasa's good at presenting large gobs of graphical information. Which, for the purposes of finding pictures, is a lot more useful than pattern matching.

Re:Where Picasa fits.

[sseremeth]

Picasa 2 _is_ particularly good at categorizing and organizing (as was Picasa 1.0+, but now their keywording is easier to use). If you don't think so, you haven't used it yet. It allows you to use "labels" (i.e. keywording) for anything you want - plus their search works on just about everything except facial recognition. Search on any EXIF header. Search on "red". Search on any part of the filename or path. Search on some text you may have used to describe the album of photos when you imported them. It works -- and fast. Go Google.

Re:Porn = easy to find? NO.

[mbourgon]

Totally OT - nice to see FIW in a sig. Nice crop of obs you have there. ;)

Duplicate Image Finding?

[warmgun]

I've got a fairly extensive image library with images that are the same but slightly altered (i.e. more highly compressed or cropped). Can Picasa find duplicate images? Is there any program that can?

Re:Duplicate Image Finding?

[zakkie]

gqview is your answer (errrr - google it, ;-). Can find dupes based on size, name or similarity of image. It is an awesome program, and I'm not sure why no-one has mentioned it here yet. GPL of course too ;-)

Ciao

Zak

Re:Duplicate Image Finding?

[warmgun]

Looks like a great little program, but I'm tethered to a Windows system and there doesn't appear to be a port. Is there a Windows alternative?

Re:Duplicate Image Finding?

[Advisador]

www.imagedupeless.com

dupelessly a weird name, but functional nonetheless.

Re:Duplicate Image Finding?

[Captain DaFt]

I've been using Cyotek Duplicate Image File Finder for awhile now, and it works (a bit slowly tho') for me.
http://www.cyotek.com/products/dupimgfdr.asp
plusses: It's free (as in beer), Works with most picture formats, and can be customized.
minusses: Windows only, and it's not OSS. (Oh, and did I mention it's slow?)

Google Bunts Again

[scisco]

C'mon folks. Let's grapple briefly with reality here. Picasa is clearly a precursor towards a rich client for search and organization. In other words, a shell replacement. Tags? Sharing? Search? Gee, anything else missing for a Longhorn/Tiger competitor? Unfortunately, they're still lobbing these helium-filled softballs into the marketplace. Depressingly, the model seems to be moving somewhat backwards -- what's with the emphasis on folders? Folders are to modern storage as pointers are to modern memory managers: semantically crippled. Folders will be gone within a decade (at least to the extent floppy disks are gone now.) So c'mon Google, grow some reproductive organs. Let's see a swing for the bleachers. Or are you too IPO?

Linux Version?!?

[TheCeltic]

I'd expect that a company whose main server farm runs on Linux would also release Linux versions of it's tools.. i.e. googlebar and picasa. (I know you can get googlebar from mozdev.org, but no picasa).

Missing feature in all photo catalogers?

[jtapper]

I want a feature that will simply let me search for pictures taken between date1 and date2. That cannot be difficult as this information is already stored in the EXIF tags.

Does any viewer/cataloger actually support this?

Re:Missing feature in all photo catalogers?

[thecombatwombat]

iPhoto supports this, you can make a smart album with a range of dates.

Re:Missing feature in all photo catalogers?

[jtapper]

Why is the answer for questions like this always: You need a Mac.

you know what, I should get one.

Re:Missing feature in all photo catalogers?

[WarrenInSaskatoon]

PaintShop Photo Album is my current image cataloging tool. It supports your date search criteria quite well, along with a pile of other search type stuff, keywords, custom keywords etc. My biggest gripe with both of these programs (picasa and PSPhotoAlbum) is that neither of them use or understand hierarchical filing systems. Both of them only use the name of the folder which immediately contains the photos: I can't use/search/filter on parent folders. I have no interest in using huge long folder names in a flat directory structure. Even if I wanted to, windows starts to gag when I have more than a few thousand folders in a single folder... Any one else out there want this feature?

Re:is it free?

[l3v1]

Yes it does. I blocked it, installed it fine, then disabled automatic update checking and never tried to connect again.

Don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist...

[autarkeia]

but does Picasa ever send any data back to Google? Does it ever send back "anonymous" basic data like "This is the pixel data for what user X12345 selects as a problem redeye area" or "The user liked the results of the 'I'm feeling lucky'' button.'

For example, what if User X used the redeye tool to successfully and satisfactorially remove redeye from a random image, and all of the data regarding how the software did the redeye fix and the data about whe sent to Google anonymously. This data could then be used, for example, by a relatively basic artificial intelligence image processing algorithm in order to be able to use it to determine the best way to de-red-eye an image.

Anonymous image data of such magnitude could be immensely useful.

iPhoto download.

[Xenex]

Can you point me to free download of iPhoto?

Yes.

Re:Great software.....but where's the web publishi

[DietFluffy]

That option only creates a local html file, so the end user would still need a ftp client to upload the files to a server. And this process isn't even compatible with their own blogger, which seems like a huge oversight.

Note: this is only relevant if you want to upload entire albums to blogger because their 'hello' software allows you to upload individual photos just fine.

gqview

[zakkie]

Not sure why no-one's mentioned gqview, which works amazingly well. Can catalogue, find dupes, etc, etc, etc. Plus runs on Linux (and other non-MS platforms) and is GPLd. http://gqview.sourceforge.net/

Ciao

Zak

Free?

[kartiknarayan]

I installed this this morning, and to my surprise, the 2nd or 3rd time I started the app, it started asking for an activation key and said I had 15 days to trial the software. Clicking on the 'Buy...' button took me back to the Picasa 2 web page.

Anyone else see this? Anyone knows what's happening???

Re:Free?

[krosk]

Pretty sure you got it off a bad mirror. I'd uninstall and re-install direcly from http://www.picasa.com/ . The website says it's free and there would be no use for an activation key. I've been running it for a couple days now and haven't had that experience... where'd you get that install in the first place???

What programming language and IDE they used?

[Max_W]

What programming language and IDE they used to write Picasa2? Anyone know or can tell from the software look?

As Bevis would say...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Picasa? Pick a ya own Assha!

Re:Well, guess we know where their biases are

[Phroggy]

Posting pictures of Bill ol Gates in pimp mode made sense. He's was a lonely guy!

You mean this?

My meager attempt to level the playing field

[majest!k]

I can't believe nobody's mentioned ACDSee yet.. we ARE comparing Windows image viewing/sharing/manipulation programs right??

I've tried Picasa 2 - it's slower than ACDSee 7 and seems to have a bug with its webpage export feature. I just tried creating a thumbnailed page from their existing templates four times... twice amongst two different folders (~20 jpgs ea) and it halted export about 85% thru with a dialog popping up saying "export cancelled." Dunno whats goin' on with that.. no crash/debug/error logs to help explain either..

If Google wants to step into this arena then we might as well size them up with the current king of the ring, so to speak - ACDSee has been my favourite image viewing app since v3 and it's gotten better with every new release. Yes, some might find it bloated, but that's all about setting it up to do what YOU need it to - since it can do everything from unzipping files to creating HTML pages.

Sure, it's not free and it doesn't have the GMail/Blog integration - but it's got more features than Irfan View and Picasa (maybe even combined). I'll spare you the gigantc features listing, but check out the link for more info.

Sorry if this seems like a rant, I have nothing against Google - just the hordes of Google fanboys on /. who believe anything Google touches is gold.

Cheers.

[I'm in no way affiliated with ACD Systems]

Picasa is a cheeky bitch

[danila]

I just hate it when programs do things on their own. Especially when I tell them not to do it.

On install Picasa 2 asked whether I want to keep old database from Picasa or index my disk and find all pics. I chose the first option, but still found out later that Picasa 2 added My Documents folder (which I absolutely abhore and don't use for anything, so it only contains things like NFS2 save files and other crap that various retarded programs put there) and two partitions J: and K: that it has absolutely no business indexing. Surprisingly, the rest of the disks were left as they were (i.e. only some folders on F: were added).

Also, for some unknown reason they removed thumbnails from Picasa albums, which is stupid.

Picasa 1 vs Picasa 2

[krosk]

Does anyone know how to set Picasa 2 to save the rotation changes to the JPEG and not in some application data file somewhere? I constantly import pictures and then alter them using Picasa, but the rotation changes don't seem to come up when I upload them to a website. What's going on?

Re:Don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist.

[ambrosine10]

No.

Re:Great software.....but where's the web publishi

[dawnread]

I use Nokia Lifeblog - it allows you to post to blogging accounts like Typepad. It's a free download for a trial version and you acn import files off your hard disk so you don't even need a Nokia phone!

Umm.... they did

[spookymonster]

RTFA - PC Magazine's review

Re:Don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist.

[knownzero]

You can't install this software without it calling back to the mothership so it has to be sending some data out to them. (Try denying the Zonealarm request when installation starts. The installation will promptly fail.) Now, I don't know if there's data being sent out after that however.

Re:Don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist.

[CheeseTroll]

Actually, all your personal photos will start showing up on images.google.com for the whole world to see. (Just kidding! Yours was a good question, though.)

a combined effort (ot)

[thegnu]

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-SP IP/rubriq ue.php3?id_rubrique=3

If they all would combine their forces, not only would they probably make a lot more headway, they'd have the ever so marketable name G-spotKam.

Re:What's in a name?

[sseremeth]

Not that you asked, but if you knew what the Picasa team went through to find this name, you'd appreciate it. T-shirts were made to commemorate the name choice after literally months of debate on the issue. Picasa - the home for your pictures.

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).

Picasa versus Adobe Album 2

[carlcmc]

I use Adoble Photoshop Album 2.0. The wonderful feature about that is the tag system. You make predetermined tags and as you browse your pictures you can select multiple pictures and drag a tag onto them. Or selece multiple tags and drag onto one or more pictures.

To view just pics of my daughter and my son, i place a check next to just those two tags. Very easy, intuitive etc.

As far as I could tell with Picasa v1 there was nothing similar or as easy. Does v2 let you do anything like this in such an easy manner?

Re:Picasa versus Adobe Album 2

[sseremeth]

It existed in Picasa 1 as keywords. Picasa 2 has "labels" and they work very similarly. Right click on a thumbnail or image to "label" it seems to be the easiest way.

Re:Great software.....but where's the web publishi

[vivarin]

I wrote the web export system. There's even a way to define your own templates. Search the picasa directory for a .doc file that explains how.

Re:I Tried Picasa Last Time

[glasya]

Picasa and Irfanview are two totally different animals. I don't do any of what you listed in Picasa. It is pretty much a pain free way to catalogue all my images. I am a digital artist, and I have gigs and gigs of image files. Nothing has come close to being as fast and easy to use to CATALOGUE these files. Now, if I want to do rotations, or change file formats, or any of that I'll open up photoshop. But if i want to breeze through my collection, that is neatly sorted by keywords and categories, nothing can beat this. It is so much faster than XnView (which I absolutely luff for batch processing) or Irfanview on my system.