Picasa 2.0 Released, Reviewed

firebirdy writes "Google's Picasa 2.0 was announced yesterday (with support for RAW, Gmail integration, and uploading to popular photo services, among other things) and PC Magazine is ready with a review. Four and a half stars, and the only drawback found by PC Magazine folks was the lack of support for handheld devices."

Picasa 2 is the best photo program I have used

[chrisgeleven]

It is:

1) Easy to use
2) Extremely fast (even when applying effects)
3) Powerful

Very rarely does a program combine all three of those and not feel like a bloat piece of junk. Picasa does it all.

It can easily print photos or you can upload/order prints online.

You can even export photos to a web page (even save as XML format!).

It has a cool feature called "I'm Feeling Lucky" (get the Google reference) that automatically adjusts everything from color to contrast to redeye. It has worked virtually flawless for me so far on a select number of photos that I have had a chance to play along with and if there is an issue, the undo takes a second (if that) to return to the original.

Simply amazing. Best part, it is free :)

Slick

[Sunspire]

Picasa 1.2 made me kick Adobe Album 2.0 out, the software I was using previously to organize photos. The speed of the Picasa interface is something you have to try for yourself, it runs like a greased weasel. Adobe Album behaves like it's downloading the images as progressive jpegs from the net in comparison, you can see the gradual redraws of the image when you open the edit mode.

Now Picasa 2.0 comes along, and it is at least at easy to use and fast as 1.2. It also fixes my number one problem with these organizers, that the program's internal organization is not reflected on the disk, only in some metadata. That just doesn't cut it in real life when you're working with multiple programs. I bet Adobe will start to give away their Album software for free soon, I just don't see who would want to buy it when Picasa is simply better, faster and free.

omg, best photo organizer ever!

[PhiberOptix]

I've just given a try on the software (i had installed it when 1.0 came out, but was unimpressed by then, i don't remember why).
But i used it for like 30 minutes and its amazing. I always hated having to browse folders to look for pictures, and i don't have to do it anymore. I gave a quick glimpse on the effects panel, and the red eye remover is easy and very effective.

this is a really cool software. really.

ps. no, i don't work at picasa, google, or anywhere near US at all.

Re:AWESOME

[Anonymous Coward]

Great philosophy. Why don't you just go ahead and remove all of Windows, then?

Re:AWESOME

[burns210]

Good thing you made a rash decision. Because all those Picasa-based porn sites that install activex contrlols really get to you.

Why are you even running windows if you have such a hatred for an integrated system program?

Virtually all IE vulnerabilities are accessed by going to a hacked site or similar. Picasa doesn't do that. How could it? Beyond which, adjusting your security settings absolves you of most problems anyway.

Sure, it is fun to bash microsoft, I have done it too. But don't be stupid about it, there are ways to improve security on any system, and Piscasa on Windows is no different.

Re:Picasa

[Daniel Ellard]

As for the state of the art, for the last 20 years there was no compelling need for powerful data organising software, because there was little data on most consumer machines.

There's been a heck of a lot of data that needs to be organized on non-"consumer" machines, however! The amount of data you're talking about should be measured in instances, not megabytes. The fact that a digital photo is more than a thousand times larger than an invoice or a patient record or what have you doesn't make it more difficult to manage -- it just makes the hard drive manufacturers happier.

Very few people have a million photos they need to manage. Very few moderate-sized businesses have fewer than a million records they need to organized in a bunch of different ways.

It's not the data management -- it's the GUI.