At Home with John and Debbie

Reading more Mac advocacy, here, I found mention of Picasa 2. It’s a picture browsing and cataloguing tool for Windows, it’s free and it’s owned by Google (for whom I have brand loyalty).

So I tried it.

It turns out to be very good indeed at what it does. It applies the novel labelling and searching paradigms from Gmail to your photo collection. It uses tricks to make the user experience seem incredibly fast and smooth (I suspect: rendering images it thinks you might view soon in the background, cacheing a large number of thumbnails, showing you “rough” renders ASAP then following up with refined versions).

You can do all the expected operations on an image: crop, rotate, colour balance, contrast, red eye, effects, etc. The twist is that (like iPhoto, I gather), your image file is not rewritten with these changes. Instead the set of operations is stored and reapplied every time you view the image with Picasa. Quickly. This means you never need to be scared of losing your original, but it also means that if you view the picture other than with Picasa you won’t see your changes. You can export your Picasa-modified picture as a new file however.

There is an incredibly cute timeline mode, which I can’t adequately explain.

It appears Picasa’s business model is to push business towards affiliates. If you want to publish to the Web, Picasa will upload your pictures to hello.com. If you want to blog them, it will talk to blogger.com. If you want to send them to a printer, it will talk to a variety of affiliated printing companies.

If your needs are different, the best you get is to export to a filesystem, and post-process from there: which is probably good enough for me.

When I couldn’t find a export-to-HTML option, I assumed it was ommitted in order to appease those affiliates: if you can export to HTML, why does hello.com need to get involved? It turns out that the option does exist, tucked away in the “folder” menu. You can even export to XML, for your own post-processing pleasure.

All in all, a good find. I’ll certainly make heavy use of it for a while, until it upsets me for some reason.

Update: after posting, I played with Picasa 2 for several hours. I’m decided: it’s magnificent. Is it better than iPhoto? I’ve no idea. I’ve never used iPhoto. However, I can say that if someone applied the same design values to an MP3 library application (and provided iPod integration), I would drop iTunes in a snap.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 at 18:48 and is filed under Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.