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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."
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.
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/
Yes, I know it's comparing Windows vs. Mac.
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
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
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 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")
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.
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.
It's like deja vu all over again.
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
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
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).
Freedom: "I won't!"
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.
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?
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.
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
- 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....
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.
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 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).