Picasa is the KEWLEST!

I have been a photography hobbyist for the better part of my life.  With the advent of digital photography, things just keep getting easier, bigger, faster and better.  An item I’ve struggled with however is managing personal photos or “snapshots” with that of the more creative photography I do when I’m able.  In the “professional photography” realm there are all kinds of great tools to help you master your craft, manage your content and present your work.  On the flipside there has always been a void where the everyday snapshot has been ignored.  I do not like to intermingle my creative work with my casual snapshots so I’m often relegated to using inferior tools to modify and store those photographs.  Now, I suppose I could work through all this by creating complicated directory structures and different databases within the professional caliber software I use but frankly that is just too much effort and risk to take.  I just want a piece of software that will import my digi-cam photos, make a half hearted attempt to organize those photos and give me some decent editing tools that I can use to iron out any wrinkles in the shots.  Is that too much to ask?  Well once again Google, through their acquisition of Picasa, has rescued me again.

So, as you may have read, I’m very Googly these days and as I’m meandering through their long list of applications one evening I stumbled upon Picasa.  I almost passed it by thinking of several rather empty experiences I had with “Snapfish”, “Smugmug” and “Flickr” but since it was now a Google product I said what the hell.  I downloaded the application and was immediately impressed by the responsiveness of the application and the very straight forward user interface.  Ok…I’ve been down this road before… but always have been left with a bad taste in my mouth.  Nonetheless, I kept playing with it.  The more time I spent with it the more it began to grow on me.  Immediately I love that the web albums were once again tied to my Google account and this required no effort since I’m always logged into to Google in many other areas.

When I import snapshots to my computer, I tend to just let them fly right on into the “Pictures” folder under your user account.  Its there for a reason after all so why not use it?  When I launched Picasa and imported that folder into it, it very quickly had organized all my photos by date and were presented to me much like the photo application built into Windows Vista.  Great!  Where Picasa is brilliant though is in the tools that they have to edit your photos, share your photos and the silky smooth interface that they give you to do these things in.  Another really unique feature is that it goes through all of your photos once they have been imported and pulls the faces it finds into a collection of it’s own making.  You can then go into that collection of “faces” and put names under each one.  Now the really cool part is that when you have future imports and it recognizes those faces it automatically places a “Name-Tag” in the meta data of that photo!  How flippin cool is that?!  Where this becomes useful is when you get into publishing web albums to their free (for the most part) hosting service. Now you can identify those in your shots to your visitors.  These nametags also can be tied to your Google Contacts which is a neat feature.

Before I get into the Web Albums though let me briefly talk about the editing tools they have.  Look, this isn’t Photoshop by any stretch but the fact is that I can do many of the corrections in Picasa easier than I can in Photoshop.  Its “red eye” tool is simply fantastic, it has a competent healing brush tool and the amount of control you have over front/back lighting, contrast, brightness and color are pretty well done.  All that aside, their “automatic” processing is pretty accurate as well so this can be a very useful tool for both the novice and the experienced.  On top of that, its all front-ended with a easy to navigate interface that you’d practically have to be a complete moron not to be able to figure out.  It really is that easy.  And that’s just the client side tools.  Take away the Web Albums and I’d still recommend this software to manage your personal photos at home.  Its easy to use, you can tag your photos, add meta data, geo-tag, easily print your photos, create collages, create DVD’s with slide shows, make giant posters and on and on and on.  Its the complete package!  Did I mention that its 100% FREE!?

This complete package becomes even more complete when you throw in the Web Albums.  This is simply brilliant in my opinion.  You take your Gmail account or Google Apps account and tie it into Picasa which is also a Google App and you are granted a 1 Gigabyte storage area for all of your photos.  Mind you, this isn’t a tremendous amount of space given the file sizes of today’s modern cameras but still its ample for some well thought out photo albums with optimized photos.  To give you a sense of how much room this is, I currently only have two web albums in place totaling 96 photographs.  I’m still under 1% of my usage.  Now lets say you have thousands of pictures that you want to upload to albums, well they have you covered there too.  You can buy 20 additional Gigabytes for $5 per year.  Thats right! per year!  Now I’m no mathematician but damn…thats pretty cheap.  The hits keep on rollin’ too.  You can share these Web Albums with whomever you want or to everyone.  They have a way to privatize the album individually or make them public.  When you share them via an email link the visitor can then look through your photo collections that they have access to and if they want they can order prints or download copies of the watermarked photos.  Its really a pretty great service.

Now for me personally, this ties into my whole realign the world into my website with Google mission.  On this site I have some of my photo collection.  Now with WordPress there are a multitude of plugins that can easily handle presenting my photos in a good looking manner.  But, guess what?  I only need one.  There is a plugin for WordPress called KPicasa that links my Picasa photo albums right into my blog site!  Its beyond awesome.  The best part is that its completely automatic.  When I create a new Web Album with Picasa and upload to my Google account the Web Album is automatically and simultaneously presented on this website.  I cannot tell you how much time this will save me.  No longer do I have to go through these photos, copy them to some other directory to keep them in order, then upload them to my webserver all so that I can then finally import them into my website.  Now I just manage my photos through Picasa as I have been doing and it takes care of itself.  If I decide that one of the albums needs to be left out of my website then its easy to restrict the access to it from Picasa and it wont appear here.  I’m gushing and I dont care… I love it!

So, if you’re looking for an easy to use, easy to manage application to handle your personal photo collection then I highly recommend Picasa.  It has all the features you need and it allows you a very easy way to share your photos with your family and friends.  This is all coupled with the fact that its completely free and you have the perfect package in terms of performance and price.  Please consider it, you wont regret it.