Mai
30
2007
10 Things I love and hate about Google Picasa
Most of you may have noticed the fancy little galleries on my blog. Basically, these are the result of serious photo management using Google’s free tool Picasa. Since a weekend of traveling produces between 2 and 6 gigabytes of pictures, it needs a little more than simple put-them-in-a-folder-and-use-Windows-Picture-and-Fax-Viewer to keep track of all those beautiful pictures. 
After having used Picasa2 for more than a year now, I believe I can definitely say what I think is great about it and what pretty much sucks when managing a massive amount of pictures.
Please don’t get me wrong. I still think Picasa is a great tool for photo archiving. Otherwise I wouldn’t be using it all the time. However, there are still some improvements possible that could make it a lot more comfortable.
10 Things I love about Picasa
- Ease of use
There are few tools that are as easy to use as Picasa. Many sophisticated features in few controls help to achieve this. For instance the constant-speed-scrolling-control helps you to let your mousewheel chill while admiring your photography skills. Simple, but great… - Fancy visual effects
Every time I start Picasa, I once more fall in love with those awesome visual effects. It starts with the smooth scrolling through the thumbnails and ends with the very cool spinning star when starring a photo. - No originals are harmed
Thanks to (proprietary) incremental storage of edits to an image no originals are harmed unless you want them to be changed. And even if you decide to persist the changes, the originals are still available. - Storage of the caption right inside the image file
Picasa utilizes the non-proprietary IPTC standard to store the image’s caption (and keywords) directly in the JPEG file. Many other graphical editing software or online gallery tools are able to read these values (only Windows Explorer can’t
)… - XML and plain HTML exports
Simple and effective. The basis for my galleries inside of my blog posts. However, custom theming as well as support for semantically flavoured picture XML (some kind of RDF) with support for Geotags would be great. - One overview of all your pics
Sounds incredibly trivial. But being able to scroll through all of your pictures is simply great. - Thumbnail caching
Thanks to cached thumbnails, Picasa is really quick in displaying a fair amount of pictures on the screen. However, I’d love to be able to select the drive where the cached thumbnails are stored. - Locate on disk command
Another one of those features that you probably start to miss if they disappeared for whatever reason… Only multi-selection of files would be nice to have in addition. - Nice looking histogram & camera information
I got no idea why it’s the symbol of a propeller hat but the basic camera information hidden behind this button is quite useful if you want to find out who of your mates took this particular picture. - Comprehensive printing options
The print contact sheet option in particular lets you print your favorite pictures on glossy paper very easily.
10 Things I hate about Picasa
- Album labels are not stored inside the directories / No tagging support
I tend to organize my pictures using the “albums” option. However, when moving the folder containing the pictures to my external harddrive or a network share, the albums are completely lost. This workaround describes a pretty bad way of moving labels between different machines requiring the path not to change.
Honestly, I don’t understand this. The keyword feature in Picasa is somewhat redundant to albums. They are much more like tags and stored inside the JPG file. Why does the UI support for keywords suck like this? Come on guys, get us a cool tagging approach using the already implemented “keywords” with a nice UI. We know that you can do great UIs…
- Some annoying UI bugs
Occasionally, when deleting a picture the view changes to the last picture in the album. The Photo Tray sometime behaves unintuitively. The HTML Export is based on the selection and not the folder even though this is the name of the menu. Stuff like this… - Consolidated display of subdirectories
Sometimes I’d wish to have the pictures of the subdirectories merged into the upper directory inside Picasa. Of course, one could do this with albums, but this pretty much isn’t very nice. - No dual monitor/multi screen support for slideshows
Ever wanted to show some pictures on a party using a projector? There’s no way of getting Picasa to show the slideshow on the secondary monitor (the one without all icons on the desktop)… - Primitive folder manager
It’s damn slow. The icons in the tree view sometimes do not correspond to the list of watched folders. Could be much better… - Issues with the export functionality
- no support for PNG/GIF export (when originals have this format)
This is especially interesting for screenshot management. - malformed XML in XML export
Ampersands (&) in the path of a picture are not properly escaped - no quality options for HTML export and email export
Why is it there for the normal export, but not for the other types of export?
- no support for PNG/GIF export (when originals have this format)
- Cached thumbnails of photos on removable media/network drives are not displayed when disconnected
The entire photo collection seems to “shrink’ on disconnect of your external HDD or a network share. However, the nice thing is that the thumbnails remain cached. Would be nice to have the thumbnails and albums displayed partly transparent or something to at least be able to see what’s there… - Very rudimentary movie player
There are no controls at all for starting, stopping, pausing, etc. of a movie clip. - No 5 star rating
Wouldn’t an iTunes-like 5 star rating be much cooler than the simple starring of photos? - No full EXIF support
Would be nice to have all EXIF values displayed. Ever wondered what your cam stores? Check out ExifTool…
Please note that all this stuff is based on v2.7 (Build 36.40) of Picasa.
