Digital Home Thoughts: BusinessWeek Online's Burt Helm Slams Picasa

"Would that Picasa's substance matched its aesthetic. While the program does a competent job with basic editing and organizational tasks, and presents beautiful slideshows, it has a handful of clumsy features. Sharing using Picasa is glitchy and cumbersome, and it lacks the advanced-editing features included with the big photo-editing software applications like Photoshop. When you start up the program, Picasa offers to scan your computer and grab all the photos on your hard drive. This is a nice feature. It works quickly, and it found photos that were buried deep in my hard drive, including a few sets that I forgotten I had. To start, images are sorted by folder, but they can be dragged and dropped into different folders. Or, you can create special albums by dragging images into the "photo tray" at the bottom and labeling them together."

It's not often that I read a review where I honestly wonder why it was allowed to be published, but I was thinking exactly that when I read this article from Burt Helm. To give you an idea of how he "reviews" Picasa, he criticizes it for not having as many editing tools as the $599 Photoshop CS2. Gee Burt, one is free, and one is $599. Are you expect feature parity? :roll: The rest of the idiotic review pans Picasa for not having photo-sharing features on par with Web-based services such as Flickr. I think it would be cool for Picasa to be able to tap into a Flickr account, but Helm is somehow expecting to see something like Flickr built into Picasa. Of course, this is the same guy who doesn't like Gmail because it threads email conversations when he and another person sends email with the same subject line for months. Uh, Burt? That's what threading is for. There are a lot of things I'd like to see improved in Picasa (zoomed red-eye reduction for one), but this "review" criticizes Picasa for all the wrong things.