http://picasa.google.com/index.html

Version 2.0

I searched long and hard for a good photo manager to manage our growing digital collection. I looked at Phoa, but due stability problems, I stopped using it. There were several commercial products, but I have been burned too many times paying for a product that soon becomes obsolete or often the product is just too expensive.

Enter Google. Google bought Picasa on July 13, 2004 and quickly offered it for free. I installed and kicked the tires and was hooked. Here are the features that make it stand out from other products:

• Pictures on disk are never modified. Picasa allows you to sharpen (and a very good sharpen at that) and apply many adjustments to your pictures. Ingeniously, it does not modify the picture, but stores the changes seperatly, allowing you to go back and undo adjustments at a later date. This feature is invaluable and will help preserve your picture collection from edit after edit.
• Smart crop. This may be a common feature, but is great for printing pictures. It allows you to crop at the standard photo print sizes, 4×6, 5×7 and 8×10.  This ensures your pictures fit the entire print.  Since the actual picture is never modified, you can go back and change the 4×6 crop to a 5×7 with ease.  You can also perform a freeform crop which doesn’t bind you to any of the existing ratios.
• Terrific UI. The user interface is what hooks you initially. It is very pleasing to the eyes and easy to navigate. All picture adjustments are very fast and intuitive.  Resizing all thumbnails is painless and fast.
• Picture Tray. This makes selecting pictures a breeze. You add them to the tray and then perform all the actions you want on the tray. It works for rotating, printing, emailing (which also allows you to automatically resize), ordering prints or exporting.
• Numerous Other features. There is simple too much to list here, but this is a sample: Send pictures to one of many popular print services, ability to handle movies, can import right from scanner or camera, resizable thumbnails, gift CD creation, Poster printing (prints multiple pictures and you paste them together), crop, fine rotation, redeye removal, auto and manual color, auto and manual contrast, numerous brightness adjustments. Numerous effects: sharpen, sepia, B&W, warmify, file grain, tint, saturation, soft focus, glow, filtered B&W, focal B&W, graduated tint.

Problems with Picasa (Yes, it isn’t perfect, but the problems are worth living with):

• TAGS!! One of the requirements I had for album software was to be able to easily tag pictures so I could perform searches. Picasa does have Keywords and it partials meets my needs, in that you can search very easily on any keyword, however editing them is a difficult process. It does not remember previous keywords, so you have to re-enter them every time. There is no reason there can’t be a drop down list to choose from, and preferably a tree list of keywords. The keyword dialog isn’t even available from the right menu.
• Scratch removal. While there numerous effects and adjustments that can be made to pictures, being able to remove scratches from scanned pictures would eliminate the need to other photo editing software.
• Library Disappears. I have my picture library on a network drive. On occasion I will lose the network connection and thus the drive letter. When this happens and I load Picasa, it forgets about all the images in it’s library. Picasa will rediscover the pictures again (slowly), if the directory is set to autodiscover new pictures. It does remember all the edits you made to pictures, but it would be nice if it could recover more gracefully. This also won’t affect most people.
• No direct export to Gallery. I will admit this is hard to call a problem, and it is a little selfish, but it sure would be nice. I use software called Gallery to display pictures on the Internet. Being able to export selected pictures right into Gallery, or for that matter Flickr or other popular photo sites would be the bomb. To their credit, you can export to Blogger, which is also owned by Google and is a free service. Ideally, some sort of API or SDK would be nice allowing the amazing gallery developers to hook in. There was even some code written for Gallery to import Picasa exports, but I have yet to look at it.
• Problematic DVD backups. I have attempted to backup collections to DVD, but it something goes wrong with the process, you pretty much have to start over. I still prefer the old method of just copying the actual files to DVDs.

Picasa is one of those applications I simply can’t live with out. It is a true photo management system. It isn’t a replacement for simple photo viewers like Irfanview, and it isn’t suppose to be. If you take digital pictures, you need this software to manage your collection, no questions asked.