It's Nothing Personal Picasa, but I Need More Out of This Relationship

[Jason Dunn]

I've been an unabashed fan of Picasa since I first started using it last year. The user interface was light years beyond any other tool on the market, and when it became free I installed it onto every friend and family's computer that I could. I still do, but I've had to stop using it as my primary tool for managing my photos. When I wrote <a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/articles.php?action=expand,4939">the article on my digital workflow</a> more than a year ago, Picasa was a core component because I found it so amazingly easy to use it to adjust and fix my photos. I had other tools that were ultimately more capable (PhotoImpact), but they were also slower, and more complex. When Picasa 2 came out with even better tools, I was in heaven, but I started to get frustrated with a core limitation of the software that is designed as a beneficial feature, but to me it's nothing but negative.<br /><br />What's the feature you may ask? Picasa's iPhoto-like ability to edit the photo without permanently saving those changes. Why does that cause problems you might ask?<!> Well, I have two laptops and two desktop computers that I use regularly. I use a synchronization program to keep all the files in sync on every computer - this gives me the freedom to use any computer I want, knowing that all the files I need will be on it. The problem is that the image editing data, the stuff that tells Picasa that this image has been cropped for instance, isn't located inside the meta data of the file itself. So that means that if I crop a photo on computer A, when I look at that same photo on computer B, it won't be cropped. Picasa is a one-computer-only solution.<br /><br />It gets worse though: Picasa has no SAVE feature. If you spend a few minutes editing an image and you decide "Ok, that's it, my image is final", you can't make the changes permanent. There's a SAVE A COPY feature, but that means you'll end up with a duplicate image and a file name you'll need to change if you had them numbered. Too much hassle for me.<br /><br />I'm not the only one that gets confounded by this "feature" - I've installed Picasa on all the computers of my family members, and I get puzzled looks when I explain that once they've made the edits and they want to upload them to a photo printing Web site, they have to export the images - they can't grab the images from the My Pictures folder. Most of my relatives with digital cameras use Wal-Mart Canada for ordering their photos, but Picasa only supports online photo stores in the USA. This means that Picasa 2.0 is actually worse than 1.0 when it comes to ordering photos. :roll: And it's not just inexperienced users frustrated by this "export to get the real images" approach - when I'm using <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx">Photo Story</a> to create slide shows the images I'm pulling in are unedited unless I first export them from Picasa. Awkward!<br /><br />There's so much to like about Picasa - it's still the best designed photo album application I've ever seen. It leaves Photoshop Elements in the dust, hands down. In fact, the more I use Elements 3.0, the more I hate it and appreciate the simple beauty of Picasa. But until the program is updated with a real Save feature, or some way to synchronize changes among multiple computers, Picasa is of limited use to me.

[cmchavez]

Has there been any word of a "major" update to the Picasa software from either Picasa or Google? I dumped my use of the MS Photo Suite because of some of the same reasons you list, but unless something new from Picasa comes out, I may have to crawl back to MS for prolonged use photo tools.

Is there anyone else out there that suffers from the "Google" effect? It's similar to the "Apple" effect; when they put out a new product, it looks like a godsend. Only after extended use do you notice any problems, but you're still very forgiving about them anyway. :?

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Hmm, ok, I to prefer to use specialised software, so that means Picasa does only one thing for me, and that is sorting out my photos. Photo viewing is done in XNview, while editing and printing in Photoshop. So for me Picasa is just fine for what it does.

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Well, apparently the information is saved in the picasa.ini of the same folder the picture is in.

I do prefer this approach, but I guess it's the way our workflow goes; I prefer to leave the original copy untouched as much as possible.

[cliche]

Have you tried exporting your pictures? Hold the pictures in the tray, ctrl+shift+s, set destination, image size and jpg quality, and hit ok. Your pictures will be in that folder along with the changes you've made in Picasa.

Picasa is enough for 99% of my personal pictures and does everything in less than half the time. For example, you can do the above in Photoshop batch command, but it'll take a whole lot longer.

[Jason Dunn]

Has there been any word of a "major" update to the Picasa software from either Picasa or Google?

We just had it a few months ago: Picasa 2.0. ;-) I don't think we'll see anything from them for quite a while.

[Jason Dunn]

Have you tried exporting your pictures? Hold the pictures in the tray, ctrl+shift+s, set destination, image size and jpg quality, and hit ok. Your pictures will be in that folder along with the changes you've made in Picasa.

Yes, I've tried the exporting option, but as I explained in my article, it's not sufficient. There's nothing smooth about having to export the images then move them back into the original folder and overwrite the non-edited images. That's clunky.

Picasa is enough for 99% of my personal pictures and does everything in less than half the time. For example, you can do the above in Photoshop batch command, but it'll take a whole lot longer.

Oh, I agree - Picasa is superb at so many things. I still use it quite a bit, but no longer for image editing or even image management. I mostly use it to find images. If they'd just add a SAVE command, I could go back to using it. Can you think of a single Windows application that doesn't have a SAVE command? It's very odd... :?

[ojlittle]

Like Jason, I do the same (use a program to keep multiple computers in sync) &amp; I have the same problems.

I use PSE 3.0 for more in-depth categorizing &amp; Picasa for day-to-day showing of pictures and minor orginization. However, I do crop &amp; enhance my pictures most of the time only with Picasa. I wish there were an option NOT to save the original file. I back-up my digital negatives to multiple sources so if I need the original file I'll have access. They should atleast make this function an option.

[Tim Adams]

*chuckle* I've never noticed this. Mostly because I normally only fiddle with red eye settings (which are saved). Any major edits I do in PSP.

Thanks for the sync software tip - I've been looking for something like this for a while.

[sheik]

I'm trialling iMatch (www.photools.com/) at the moment.
So far it seems extremely powerful, but fairly simple to use.

/\dam

[makicr]

What I don't like is that you cannot view networked photos. All the photos have to be on the same computer. (An extension of the one-computer-software comment made in the review).

[Jason Dunn]

What I don't like is that you cannot view networked photos. All the photos have to be on the same computer. (An extension of the one-computer-software comment made in the review).

Actually, you can. Just map the folder to a networked drive and Picasa will scan that drive as if it were a local folder - it works quite well. The downside is that if you ever start up Picasa when that folder is disconnected, it will purge the database and you'll have to re-scan it all from scratch. That's the way 1.6 used to work, I think 2.0 is the same.

[Jason Dunn]

Discussion of file synching and FolderShare moved here:

http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8246