Customer Reviews

Picasa Photo Organizer

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Picasa 1.5.1 is a delightfully easy-to-use and inexpensive program that seems to have been developed for beginners who want to manage a limited set of digital photographs. Intermediate users and people with many photographs (that is the point of using an image manager, isn't it?) may quickly outgrow the program due to Picasa's limited metadata handling capabilities, which hurts the program in two ways..

[Picture metadata (data about pictures) are the stuff that allows one to preserve information such as the original date and time of a picture, as well as caption text (so one can recall everyone in a picture or the context of the picture, ten or twenty years later), inside the picture itself.]

Picasa can read some EXIF metadata (the standard used by digital cameras), but has no facility to edit or add to the picture metadata. A consequence is that people who want to scan and organize their shoeboxes of old photographs and film negatives may find Picasa's timeline-based organization useless, unless they resort to an external tool (such as Exifer) to timestamp their scanned pictures. This is ironic, since Picasa uses EXIF time information to sort pictures. Picasa does not support IPTC and XMP metadata.

While Picasa allows descriptive text to be attached to album titles, the program does not allow caption text to be attached to individual pictures. Instead, Picasa relies on a clunky keyword system for photographs. The keywords are not visible either in thumbnail preview or picture view modes. The user must press <Ctrl><K> or click on the Keyword button in the lower left of the screen to view or edit keywords. The keywords are not embedded into the picture, but are separately stored by the program. Anyone with whom you share your pictures will have to enter their own keywords in their own image management software. While keywords optimize Picasa's search functions, keywords do not convey the photographer's comments about the content and context of a picture as well as caption text.

Picasa is a good program for beginners, with potential to become a great program for everyone else in future releases.

I do a lot of digital photography. I think Windows XP does a fine job organizing and creaing thumbnails of photos, and my transfer software from the camera works pretty well, too. But these can't compare to Picasa Version 1.6, software that works very well to organize, adjust and view collections of photos.

I installed the trial version (full software that expires in 15 days without a serial number.) That's nice--a good way to test out a new product with the full feature set. The installation was quick, and immediately, the software allowed me to pull photos from all over my hard drive. You have a choice of lettting it get photos from the entire drive, or just from folders you choose, such as "My Documents/My Pictures"-- a nice option if you don't want to look at mail attachments or photos in other documents.

Now the intuitive power of the Picasa package comes into play. There are auto buttons for "enhance" (quick fix), Red Eye removal, Crop and other quick fixes you usually need. This is all done on the fly, without having to put each photo into your normal image manipulation software. But...if you want to go further, it's easy enough to open up your image software of choice from Picasa. I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 for more advanced picture adjustments.

However, generally Picasa does a pretty good job routine tasks such as red-eye reduction, so no need to go to Adobe. To do red-eye reduction, just drag your mouse over the eye, and let Picasa do it for you. Not bad results, either. Cropping is a matter of dragging the mouse to select the part of the picture you are keeping, and then click. Done.

Another valuable feature is the ability to resize a photo. Many photos, as they come out of the camera, are too large to email or post on various places online (Ebay, blogs, for example.) To resize, all you have to do is highlight the photo, right-click, and then use the dialog box, with the very useful slider bar that resizes the picture. This is absolutely a slam-dunk. From that point you can go to "E-mail picture" and in a few keystrokes, go from transfer of a photo, to resized, to sent out in the mail. Very quick, very painless, very very cool. Even cooler--a quick setup of a webpage to share your photos. If you aren't adept at HTML or webdesign, this is helpful.

The software is a complete steal at this price. If you are giving a digital camera as a gift, I'd throw this in to make the gift even more marvelous. I am considering getting a copy of this for everyone in our shutterbug-infested family. Absolutely great software.

Picasa has been called the iPhoto for Windows. (iPhoto is Apple's digital imaging software for Mac OS X.) The compliment highlights the program's biggest virtue: ease of use. The interface is clean and good-looking, with tools organized in an intuitive manner. While one may fault the designers for the program's lack of sophisticated editing tools (for a more complete package, try Microsoft Picture It 2002), keep in mind that this is a program for casual digital photographers who want to stay sane over organizing their pictures. Organization is what picasa is all about: sorting pictures by timeline, assigning keywords and titles, rotating and one-touch enhancing (works surprisingly well), quick e-mailing... I think Amazon's low price makes this a great buy.

This is version 1.01. You can upgrade to the newest version, v1.5, for free on Picasa.net (not picasa.com!).

Got this for my wife so she doesn't have to use Photoshop. We use it to deal with our snapshots and save Photoshop for in-depth photo projects. I tried the demo of Adobe 'Album' product but it seemed slow to load and less intuitive and easy to use than Picasa.

Pros: Love the interface, makes it easy to import, crop and print our digital photos.

Cons: Would like to have drag and drop tagging for metadata and the ability to easily change the brightness/contrast of images. The edit 'enhance' function seems to do nothing.

Overall, hats off to Lifescape, looking forward to the next release!

This is a great program that makes managing hundreds of digital photos very simple and intuitive. As a power user I crave more advanced options and settings, and I have yet to find a program that does exactly what *I* want. But I never hesitate to recommend Picasa to friends and family. Especially now that Google has bought the company that makes Picasa and made it a FREE download!! Get yours at http://www.picasa.com/google/ and have fun :-)

I haven't given back to these reviews, which have helped me in so many decisions. So here goes: I was using Photoshop and the XP file organizing tool. It was working sort of ok, but too complicated for my wife.

She had iPhoto envy. I saw the review that said this is 'iPhoto for windows'. It is, and probably even better. This is the cleanest, easiest to use program, of any sort, I have seen for Windows. It does a fantastic job organizing photos; it will make some simple adjustments (red eye, 'enhance', crop to standard sizes); it does the cool slide show to music that iPhoto does; it prints magnificently; it will automatically transform your photos into email size, and launch your email program. It's *the* photo program for the non geek. And best of all, you can try before you buy (15 day free trial at the picasa site).

I just got Picasa from my granddaughter as a present and I love it! I was amazed that it found all my pictures for me. It's so easy to figure out that even this old bird can now e-mail pictures to his family. Who knew? I would recommend this program to anyone who is baffled by e-mailing pictures - Picasa is such a breeze.

This program is absolutely great. Everything is so simple and straight forward. It seems like they figured out exactly what you want to do with your pictures and made it really quick and easy. I am so glad a friend of mine told me about this. I didn't realize how poorly designed my old software was until I used this. Boy, what a difference good design makes.

I have been operating Picasa for three or four years and upgraded the program once.... which had some aggravating problems. But, nonetheless, I have purchased two other photo organizing software programs (Picture It and Photo Explosion) and I find Picasa still is above the rest in picture display and organization. I guess it depends on what you are looking for in a photo organization program. The merry-go-round display of your pictures and the ability to just run the slideshow w/music and enjoy them full screen can't be beat.
Their photo editing ability is a little on the weak side and I tend to use other programs for that as I do a lot of electronic scrapbooking. But if you want easy ability to download your photos into a computer and be able to go back and enjoy them - email them, etc. I would vote for this product any day!

It is a very simple program to use but it is also very limited as to what it can do. If all you want to do is download your digital camera, save the the pictures, then e-mail them, this is the program for you. We never could get the camedia program that came with her camera to work right,even the version that you had to buy and with picasa there has never been a problem.