After hearing the news that Google purchased Picasa and were now giving away the software for free (as in beer), I thought I’d give it a try.

My first impression is that it is very elegant. The interface is clean and responsive. The main screen provides a unified view of all of the photos in your album ordered by date. Double-click any one to view it, another click to return to the album view. It uses slick cross-fades to transition between the album and individual picture views, when in slide-show mode, and also when applying effects (like red-eye reduction and “enhance”) to photos.

It doesn’t modify the directory structure of imported photos and it doesn’t even modify the photos themselves when you rotate or enhance them. In fact, you can even rename and move photos around once imported and the physical directory structure still remains unchanged. The is a Good Thing for people like me who are paranoid about software ruining my originals. One innovative feature is the Timeline view. This view shows all of your photos on a timeline and allows you to move forward and backward on the timeline to start a slideshow from that point (with mp3 background music if you like). The timeline screen also shows a black and white blowup of one of the pictures from the point in time you are currently at. A nice effect and a fun way to browse through photos.

It supports printing in various formats including a handy contact sheet. It can attach photos to email, you can order prints directly from within the application (I don’t know with whom), it can create web pages from albums, and can even send a photo to Google’s Blogger service. It also supports importing images from digital cameras so it can probably act as a complete replacement for any software you received with your digital camera.

There are probably several reasons Google was interested in this application but an important one was undoubtedly the search function. Picasa allows you to assign keywords to individual photos and groups of photos to enable you to use its built-in search functionality to find them later. Like the rest of the interface, the keywords feature is intuitive and easy to use.

The only weak points in my mind are that it does not support captions and descriptions for individual photos (just albums) and the keywords are stored in a proprietary database format. I couldn’t find any way to get my keywords back out of the application for use elsewhere. These are small gripes though and probably won’t affect most users. Picasa 2.0 was in the works before the Google buyout — perhaps these features will be added in the next version.

Overall, Picasa is a powerful application with a thoughtfully designed user interface that makes working with and browsing my digitial photo collection a breeze. Highly recommended.

Comments

1. Michael on 2005-05-05 12:10:04 wrote: *I am having the same problem with picasa. I really like the program, but it’s drawback for me is that once the keywords have been entered, you can’t transfer the files to another computer without losing the keywords. They do have a nice labeling option, that is like the keywords, but again, if you transfer the file, the information is lost *