I am an avid user of Google’s Picasa desktop client. The way it handles photos is just spectacular. It is intuitive to use, robust in its features, and free. Needless to say I am a fan.
Picasa really doesn’t do much that would be considered new, but everything that is does, it does right. Take for example the importing of photos; Picasa has never once failed to detect a camera when it is connected. I have used it with cameras’ from Sony, HP, Nikon, and, Canon. It just works.
After getting all of your photos onto your computer, the software gives you a variety of organizational option to use. You can view your pictures in folders, or chronologically. It also gives you the ability to put them in albums regardless of folder structure, or time of created.
For example let’s say you take some pictures at the beach, than a couple months later you take some pictures during the Holidays. You might have one folder named “Beach” and one folder named “Holidays 2008.” In each folder however you have some pictures of your family. What you can do is add those family pictures to a “Family” album. This allows you to view your pictures in many ways, by time, by place, or by subject, all the while keeping your folders organized and free of duplicate pictures.
So now that you have your photos organized on your computer, what about making them look pretty. For a free piece of software it actually offers a lot of editing options. It allows you to straighten, crop and remove redeye from your pictures. It also allows you to play with the contrast, brightness, and color saturation. There are also a lot of effects that you can apply such as focal points, sharpen, and film grain effects. There are many other things you can do, far too many to go into here.
Sharing your photos is dead simple with Picasa. You can either choose to upload an album that you have made or you can upload whole folders. All meta data, such as geo tagging, picture attributes, camera used, and camera settings, are transferred with the photo itself. The new web album by default will inherit all of attributes of the folder or album you transferred them from. If you happen to upload an entire album you can choose to keep that album synced up. For example if you add new pictures to your album on the client then it will automatically update the web album and vice versa. The only drawback is you need to use Google’s Picasa Web albums, which for me isn’t really a drawback since I rather like the site structure. There is a plug in for the Picasa client to upload to Flickr but it’s more of a work around than an integrated solution.
What puts this software over the top, for me, are all of the extras you get with it, and how well it just works. I like the fact that it can make slideshow movies from your photos, with custom sound tracks. You then have the option of out putting the slide show in HD resolutions. It can even take videos and stitch them together for barebones video editing. I have made picture collages for websites and desktop backgrounds. I have used it to digitize and correct all of my parent’s old film pictures. The kicker is I rarely see a hiccup or jitter in its operation. Pictures fade in and out smoothly, tool panels slide flawlessly into view and out of view. Entire Folders and Albums scroll without as much as a glitch. Its unfathomable how this piece of software is free.
What I Play 