Picasa is Pretty Cool

It's been a while since I tried Google's Picasa photo software. Being a Mac guy and advanced amateur, I use Adobe's Lightroom program for developing and printing digital photos. But, I'm helping a friend tomorrow with her digital camera and Picasa (hey Rhonda!), so I thought I should brush-up a bit.

Leave it to Google to provide lots of awesomeness, for free. Picasa is speedy, intuitive, and full of useful features that should satisfy most people simply interested in getting their digital camera photos onto their computers, and sharing with friends. Some highlights:

• It appears, though I'm not certain yet, that it lets you make some basic edits to your photos in a non-destructive manner, meaning that it saves a list of edits you've selected and shows you those edits applied to your photo, but doesn't actually change the pixels in the photo file itself. This is key - you can always go back to your original.
• If you have a Google account, you can upload your files and share them on the Web at Picasa's Web albums sites. Again, free. The Web galleries are simple, clean, and quite nice actually. Once I gave Picasa my Google account info, I selected a handful of photos from my Middle Creek Collection and clicked Web Album, and it did the rest. Here's the Picasa gallery it generated. You control who can see your album and obtain the link by signing into your Google account on the Web.
• You can have Picasa automatically "watch" folders. I tried this and it seemed to work very well. I created a new folder on my desktop called "photo test." I dragged a handful of photos into that folder, and Picasa nearly instantly populated my photo library with thumbnails.
• You can send your photos directly to your Blogspot page, if you keep one.
• The collage feature is cool. You can make a picture grid, picture pile, or standard contact sheet.
• It has a handy "locate this picture on disk" function so you can figure out where the actual files are located which correspond with your library images.
• It's got a nice backup feature that helps you burn your images to CD.
• It's free
• It also has the other standard photo library software functions you'd expect such as a slideshow and screensaver generator, and integrated "order prints" feature
  

Maybe I'm not really telling you Windows users anything you didn't already know. If so, sorry! Fellow Mac users, don't be so smug about iPhoto. In a lot of ways, I'm liking this better. It sure seems more responsive and intuitive, and being able to link-up with major services like the ones Google offers - for free - beats iPhoto's "iLife" integration that requires a for-pay .Mac account to truly leverage. Oh, and it has a Mac-based, stand alone uploader program you can use to send photos to your Picasa web page, as well as an iPhoto plug-in.

I haven't tried printing or anything yet, and I didn't see much there in terms of working with image metadata - which is important if you have a large photo library. It might be there and I just haven't looked hard enough yet.