Moving on from Picasa

I am an avid Googler and an individual who has always been fascinated with Google's business model and product development. When Google's Picasa came out as is with most of their products I had to check it out and see what it was all about. I ended up adopting it as my primary photo hosting solution out of the shear desire to keep as much of my digital life under one proverbial roof. If you are not as rigid in this desire I highly recommend that you give the Picasa development team more time because some of the glitches and pains I have had to work through with regard to this service have been ongoing and very time consuming to put it mildly. Problem #1 When synchronizing my web album with their Picasa desktop application I often find web albums duplicated. The major issue with this falls in the fact that there is no multiple album deletion capability so in order to fix this you literally have to log into your web account and delete the duplicate albums one at a time. When a hundred or more albums get duplicated this can take hours! Problem #2 Because of the synchronization issue I ran into under problem #1 I began looking for an alternative way to keep my local directories in sync with my Picasa web albums. I tried out Gladinet Cloud Desktop (see my review on SiteJabber) which offers this very service. What a nightmare! First Gladinet ended up creating hundreds of empty web albums with long binary titles during it's synchronization process with my Picasa web account. (remember the only way to delete an unwanted album is one at a time). Luckily the Picasa desktop software has a feature "Delete empty online web albums" that fixed this for me. Note: when I used this option a window popped up to confirm I wanted to delete these few hundred albums but I could not hit the "yes" button because the window was so large it pushed the "yes" and "no" commands off the screen and the window was not adjustable. (If you ever find yourself in this situation click on the window, hit "tab" twice and hit the space bar. That will select the not visible "yes" button. Problem #3 Not so much a problem as it is an inconvenience Google Picasa only allows folders one level deep for organizing. As an individual who loves to sub-categorize this is a hard limitation to work with. Problem #4 The overall design of their desktop software and their online albums is not as user friendly or forgiving to customization as it could be. One thing that drives my bananas is that I can't default web albums to "show all" at log in. Ever single time I have to click the button. After every album you navigate into you have to once again hit the button. Very annoying. Also, the sync to web buttons never seem to permanently stay in the "on" position, every so often I have to turn them on again. (Perhaps this is what causes album duplication). Just wish this wasn't so buggy. In either case I will keep working with the software as it is improved but I can't as of yet recommend this site site or their desktop software for a novice user as I feel it could really add a lot of frustration to their life.

One point not obvious in prior reviews is this: there are 2 pieces to Picasa...one that runs on your desktop, is free, and is a fine editor. Then there is the web albums piece..also free..and has all the features 99% of peeps want and need. If you are a "Google Rules" person like me...this is for you

Consider Google's Picasa for many reasons - I've been using Google's free Picasa photo editing and organizer for about a year now, and I have to say, it is worth looking at especially if you don't have an expensive program for editing your work. I do have Photoshop, but sometimes I have photos which need less time spent on post edits, and I find Picasa does what I need it to do. It can do cropping, straightening, red eye control, and much more. It can create effects such as conversion to B&W, B&W focal, Sepia, saturation control, sharpening, and much more. I can't say enough good about it. I downloaded it to use for upload to Google's album, but you don't have to use it for that. You can use it just for organizing, tagging, and basic adjustments. You will be amazed by its broad options offered for FREE. If you click on this Video on YouTUBE, you can view a five minute video describing what Picasa can do.

google's picasa photo editor makes editing photo's so easy. A free program that can improve image as well as add texture, add effects, change colours. I decided to try it out on 1 photo & I redid that 1 photo 58 different ways with picasa. Can do so much & so easy to use, I love it.

If you take photos with a digital camera and do not currently edit your photos, you are really missing out on doing real photography. Now Google lets anyone edit their photos for free and version 3 of Picasa is very solid. Google does a great job of making free software applications and giving it to the world and stamping their name on it. Adobe used to own the market in photo editing but the problem is that their software is very complicated to use for the average user and extremely expensive. Adobe released a cheaper version for the average user and that often gets bundled with your shiny new camera. Google's Picasa is not nearly as feature rich as the adobe CS4, however, for the average user this is all they will ever need. I don't even bother with MS word anymore and just use google docs. The same is true for picasa for the average person editing their photos. Download it now, it is FREE.

I upgraded to win 7 and my photoshop no longer worked. I didn't want to fork out more $$$ for the new photoshop so I checked out the free picasa. It ireally isn't bad and with a little bit of work google's free software may eventually be robust. Definitely worth a download...it is free.

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