Selling My Soul to Google

As if I haven't already sold my soul to Google...

I've recently discovered Picasa, which Google acquired back in July. It used to be a small company that made a great photo management product. Still is. Except now that Google is calling the shots, Picasa (name of the company as well as the software) is free.

Now, don't misunderstand. Picasa is by no means the ultimate photo management tool nor is it the only one out there. From what I've read (not a whole lot, it would take quite a while to evaluate every offering that's out there), digital photo management tools range from free to over $500. For a casual user like me who is also somewhat computer literate, I want software that's easy to use but also well executed. Sure, apps from the likes of Adobe and even Jasc (makers of Paint Shop Pro and other fine products) can manage digital photos phenomenally well and I could "obtain" these apps rather easily. However, I don't want something that's feature packed. I want something that can organize my photos into albums, allow me to search for specific albums or pictures, and maybe do a slideshow now and then.

Up until now, I've been using the Kodak EasyShare software that came with my CX4310 digital camera. Even after a recent "update," this software is anything but great. It's clunky, poorly designed, and not very intuitive. This is where Picasa excels. It's very nice-looking (I've heard it called an iPhoto ripoff - if this is the case than thank you to the Picasa people for stealing yet another great Apple idea) and works reasonably fast, even on my aging (ok, aged)Pentium II-450 system. It went in and found all of my existing pictures after I told it where to look (it could've searched my whole hard drive but I wasn't interested in that - I just wanted it to index all the photos I'd taken with my camera). Unfortunately Kodak physically organizes the files in folders according to the date they were imported, thus if I took pictures over a week's time and uploaded them on October 2, the folder would be "2004-10-02." While this comes in handy at times, I'd much rather have the photos organized by description rather than date. Thankfully, Picasa is able to adapt quite well to whatever file set up it discovers. It imported all of my photos and organized them into albums based on folder name. For the most part all I had to do was rename the albums or split them into two or more parts (also easy to do in Picasa). Now that they're all organized I feel as if I've completed some major accomplishment. Not really, but the more files you have the more difficult it becomes to keep them organized, and 1200 digital photos ain't child's play.

I won't go into too much depth about Picasa's features beyond what I have already found appealing and what I anticipate coming in handy. There are also obvious drawbacks, which I'll cover as well. First, Picasa makes it easy to organize in a graphical way, something I've been longing. Text may work well for, well, text files, but I find it so much easier to organize photos in a graphical way. Drag-and-drop is fully functional in Picasa and the "photo editor" view allows three simple enhancements: crop, enhance, and red-eye reduction. Crop and red-eye are fairly self-explanatory. Enhance is nice in that it has no options, it simple picks the best mix of contrast, color, etc. to produce the best image. Like any computer-based decision, the results aren't always better than the original and sometimes I can't even tell that a change was made, but for the most part the enhance feature has been helpful. Picasa also handles importing from cameras or media cards and even has a small utility that resides in the system tray just waiting for a camera to be plugged in or a card inserted (if equipped with a card reader). Other notable features include automatic e-mailing to multiple recipients with built-in resizing. Finally, Picasa offers the option to export an album to a web page complete with thumbnails. Lots of higher-end photo management programs offer this (including Photoshop), but EasyShare didn't so I was pleasantly surprised.

As I'm sure you've guess, I have exported my first album to the web. It's pictures from camping (see this post). Access the album by clicking here. Eventually I'll add a section to the sidebar (probably between "About Me" and "Previous Posts" just to give it a prominent position) with links to each album that I put online. I'll try to export a mix of old and new.

As for the drawbacks to Picasa, there are a few. While the ability to add keywords to individual pictures (or more than one at a time as I discovered) is offered, there is no way to add a caption to a photo. EasyShare did offer this feature although I found their implementation of it to be utterly useless. Strangely, Picasa offers no zoom feature, even in "full" view. I suppose if you really need to zoom in on something you can just use a more full-featured image editing program. Finally, the search function is quite handy for filtering photos based on keyword, filename, folder name, or album name, but there seems to be no way to utilize the search results in any other way besides viewing them. For example, if I wanted to search for every picture that has my cat in it and then export them as a group to a web album, I couldn't do it. Similarly I couldn't e-mail them as a group or even view them as a slideshow. This one is actually my main gripe - sometimes I just want to see a slideshow of every cat picture! For now I'll have to settle for doing it album-by-album.

My regards to Google for acquiring such a fine company with such a fine product. Hopefully all those ingenious Google engineers can give this software a boost in features without sacrificing usability or adding too much Googleness (i.e. links to everything Google).