Tone's Notes

Picasa 2, free photo management software distributed by Google, is a wonderfully done application which delivers a number of really new features and yet it still is struggling to really win in the category.

Among the not-seen-before features are the following:

·        Managed images can be “edited” without altering the original picture. To commit the changes, you have to save a copy.

·        Integration with Hello (also offered by Google) allows peer-to-peer distribution of pictures and allows the recipient to choose their own resolution preferences.
The idea is to avoid e-mail reduced copies of pictures from friends and family. With Hello, you can choose which what resolution to receive. Brilliant.

·        When you rotate a picture, it really rotates. Just one of the many things to like about a really clean, fast interface.

The adoption thwarting issues remaining with Picasa include the following:

·        The whole notion of combining the distribution of sets of photographs with chat sessions almost works. The key thing missing is that the only way to distribute photos is through the initiation of a chat session to a single destination. This means if I have some new pictures of the children, I potentially need to initiate many individual transfers to pump them all out to friends and family. What’s really needed is to have each of these connections establish a persistent link between folders on distributed PCs. Any pictures I drop in my “friends and family” folder should automatically get pumped out to anyone I’ve ever connected to the folder as soon as their PCs are online. It should be a recipient preference whether new pictures from a particular contact are automatically retrieved at full resolution or left as thumbnails. Some configurable notification options should exist on arrival of new images.

·        A second hard problem which needs to be solved is how to manage distributed storage of a pool of shared pictures. A little redundancy is required for safety, availability and performance. Full replication isn’t practical or desirable.

·        The short story is that with its current feature set, Picasa is a sexy photo editing tool but Hello is not a practical means for sharing pictures with friends and family. Unless you don’t have more than one or two of either…

Minor nits:

·        There’s no simple way to quickly rename all the pictures in a folder.
There is a batch rename tool, but it has no real flexibility. You can rename all the selected pictures using the same name with options of including the date taken and the original resolution. There’s no control over the format of the date and time. You can easily “label” a picture. But labels end up in the Picasa private metadata, stored in an INI file. If you rename the picture, do you break the link to the metadata you provided?

·        There’s no way of fixing EXIF dates if the camera’s clock was set wrong when the pictures were taken.
As an aside here. Until the EXIF format starts including a time zone along with the date and time, the only sensible thing you can set your camera’s clock to is UTC. Take a vacation spanning several time zones and see how confusing it is to combine pictures taken with different cameras into a single chronological sequence.

·        There’s a “Save copy…” command which almost commits the picture edits back to the original files. But not quite. Picture rotation doesn’t get written out. Other kinds of edits do result in a new image being written that incorporates the changes.

·        It doesn’t abide by the date and time formats configured in Windows. Actually it does. It’s just in the Rename dialog that it displays a static format instead of the one actually used. Unfortunately (for me) is uses the same separator between date parts and time parts.

·        Google’s Picasa newsgroup is heavily spammed.

The reason this last one is so hard to get right is that some picture editing operations, like rotating a jpeg by 90 degrees, are inherently damaging to the quality of the image. Since printing a picture can easily take care of the 90 degree rotation, there’s no reason to rotate the image. Just pick landscape instead of portrait print mode. If you intend to do anything on-line with the picture though, you’ll almost definitely have to rotate it to put it up.