Tuesday, May 3, 2005
It's Nothing Personal Picasa, but I Need More Out of This Relationship
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 09:00 AM
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 the article on my digital workflow 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.
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.
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.
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 Photo Story to create slide shows the images I'm pulling in are unedited unless I first export them from Picasa. Awkward!
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.
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.
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.
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 Photo Story to create slide shows the images I'm pulling in are unedited unless I first export them from Picasa. Awkward!
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.
