Reviews of Picasa (Google)

Picasa 2

• QUICK!!!
• You can undo changes at anytime.
• I am a seasoned vet of photoshop and love the simplicity of picassa. I use it constantly for cataloging and red eye reduction.

• Can only assign pictures to one group. So say you want to have your son\'s birthday party under events and under his name, you have to choose either one.

Sadly, the Picasa v2 Help screens you quote [eg. IPTC access] claim functional features that many of us cannot verify - in fact, we claim the opposite - Picasa v2 LOOSES or disregards IPTC data in our files, and many other Picasa v2 failures.

My quote, and then I\'m outta here:

• All you work INSIDE Picasa v2 is wasted outside of Picasa v2, and
• All your work OUTSIDE of Picasa v2 is wasted inside Picasa v2.

It\'s NOT ready for prime time by my standards

I like that Picasa will allow any changes to be undone easily, but why couldn\'t they adopt a more standard convention of \"Save\" (which would overwriting the original with the changes) and \"Save As\", which would allow you to Save a copy with a different (user specified, not Picassa chosen) file name?

Understanding how and where Picassa is saving files defies standard logic. By trying to \"idiot-proof\" the program, they have made it difficult for more experienced users to use. A good example is the rotate command. After rotating a group of photos to proper orientation, why would I want to save the incorrectly rotated originals?? There -ARE- times when I really -DO- want to overwrite the original and Picassa won\'t allow that. I\'d also like to create my own folder and file naming convention and Picassa... well... guessing how and why they do things as they do makes this program less interesting for me.

• screaming fast interface for browsing thumbs
• great for jpg/png sizes that are small
• handled 15k or so images ok but 20k+ seemed to choke the background thread scanning the images
• nice flashy ui
• nice slideshow mode (make sure to go to tools > options > slideshow > high quality)

• timeline view takes forever with 20k images
• no support for raw nikon format that I use
• no support for file conversions, etc
• no way to edit IPTC info
• support for images greater than 100MB was poor - i had the picassa service die a couple times as it hit 100mb+ png from my scanned 35mm slides
• ini file per directory is created
• retarded means of \"virtually\" combining image directories but not actually moving files if you said group with next/previous
• no offline media support (i.e. cds/dvds that are offline - unless i missed it)
• proprietary closed db
• no support for netwroked thumbs/db