The Exploits of Plouj

This is a quick, biased, un-authoritative and incomplete evaluation of Google’s photo manager Picasa. In total, I’ve spent no more than a couple of hours using Picasa. I’ve already chosen to use Digikam as my photo manager so I was going to blatantly ignore its many faults and ruthlessly criticise Picasa. Don’t read this post to learn about Picasa. Download it yourself or look for more comprehensive reviews elsewhere on the ‘net. I’m writing this because I promised a friend at work to look at Picasa and later I decided to put my observations in writing. You’ve been warned.

What I liked

• importing images into the gallery using a separate and (seemingly) lower priority thread makes  the UI usable right from the start.
• it hasn’t crashed on me while importing 11,000+ pictures into the gallery
• cute, but useless timeline display application:
  
• Google provided an RPM repository which makes installing, upgrading and un-installing very easy for me

What I disliked

• simplified colour tuning controls. They might be OK for beginners, but they don’t appeal to someone like me who has used colour curves before.
  
• at first launch, Picasa started to import images from my whole home directory, which is huge and has tonnes of pictures. This only made me realize just how many images I have (mostly application icons and game project textures) that really don’t belong in a photo catalogue. I also couldn’t find a way to tell Picasa to stop and only look in certain directories.
• Picasa froze when I first tried the “tools > folder manager”. It worked on the second attempt, and I realized that this is the tool used to tell Picasa exactly what directories to include when searching for images.
• the “Tools > Experimental > show duplicate pictures” function was indeed experimental. It seemed to just give me a list of images without indicating what the duplicate pairs (or groups) were.
• the search results for the “show duplicate pictures” also showed a strange status bar at the top of the main window. I never figured out the meaning of the constantly changing seconds value or what GPixel was referring to.
  
• the “importing indicator”, although neat (it showed what picture was being imported in real time), was rather useless. Most importantly, it did not show the total progress percentage. When I tried to close it, it seemed to just re-appear in a different location along the side of the main Picasa window. Then it simply started sliding up and down without explanation.
• after a lot of clicking, I managed to loose the album list view in the left pane and had to re-start Picasa
• ugly dithered splash screen image – c’mon, we’re not in the 1990′s anymore!
• the scrollbar in the main view controls the view scroll speed, not the actual movement of the view – annoying and misleading. It didn’t let me get near the bottom right away, and I got dizzy every time I scrolled. However, I think the search result view actually changed the scroll bar function to the usual scroll bar for reasons beyond me. [Edit: after more use I realized that the way the scroll bar behaves in Picasa (combined with really smooth scrolling) helps with showing many photographs to other people looking at your screen. You can just drag the scrollbar just a bit to achieve a nice steady scroll speed and discuss the pictures instead of having to continually "pull" the images up or down with the mouse.]
• I somehow totally failed to find the familiar timeline/calendar view of my photos. Does Picasa really not have a way to organize photos in this manner?
  
• this is proprietary software from Google. I actually like a lot of stuff that comes from Google, but when it comes to software licensing, I don’t play favourites. I simply try to avoid non-Free Software as much as I can.

What I ignored

• uploading to and syncing with various web services
• ordering prints
• printing to a local/personal printer
• picture backup feature – rsync is fine for me
• passport photo function – This made me realize that I’m definitely not the intended audience of Picasa
• the ability to store video flies, which I consider to be outside of the scope of this program
• anything else I haven’t mentioned, obviously

Final thoughts

In conclusion, I’ve used my experience with Picasa to re-inforced my decision to stick with Digikam – a Free/OpenSource Software photo manager.