Picasa 2.0 Released, Reviewed 277
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."
I wish they'd release a linux version (Score:3, Interesting)
Picasa vs. iPhoto? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I know it's comparing Windows vs. Mac.
Re:Picasa (Score:5, Interesting)
This was actually the feature that sold me on Picasa. See, my problem was that at last count, my laptop had about 25Gb of porn on it, in a whole bunch of video files. I wanted to be able to categorize my porn in ways that would allow me to slice-and-dice my collection -- show me all gay porn, say, or all het porn, or all porn that involves swallowing, etc. I had taken an awkward first step by putting the media files into folders, but that ran into that whole "hard to have a media file in more than one folder" (on Windows, where symlinks/hardlinks are not really all that useful) problem. So great, but what happens when I want to see all videos where Gwen Summers swallows? Hard to do.
Picasa solves this problem elegantly and beautifully for me. I'm very happy with it.
[Sigh. Since this is Slashdot and everyone thinks you're kidding if you talk seriously about porn, I should note I'm entirely serious. In fact, before I found Picasa I attempted to submit an 'Ask Slashdot' about how other people categorize their porn collection, but it got rejected as a troll]
Re:Picasa (Score:2, Interesting)
I think they are trying to get more inroads into any type of data, and pictures are a huge aspect. The nice integration with hello.com and blogger.com seems to show that they are in that direction.
Great software.....but where's the web publishing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Picasa (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, what you've described is the basic problem addressed by any information management system. The fact that it involves photos or video is a bit of red herring. I used programs written in DBaseII to solve this kind of problem (for a vastly different domain...) twenty years ago. I find it hard to believe that the state of the art hasn't progressed until the Picasa showed up.
Picasa sucks, but Hellos is good (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well, guess we know where their biases are (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux support is unlikely as Picasa has a long history on Windows and is targeted towards grandparents. Portability was probably not a consideration.
Mac support? Nobody is going to use this instead of iPhoto.
Re:AWESOME (Score:1, Interesting)
Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
Are they trying to hurt Microsoft or Apple?
Are they trying to endear themselves to a potential audience?
Will they be tying in all kinds of for-pay add-ins?
Also, this brings up something that's been bothering me: how much source code has Google contributed back to the OS community? Any? The GPL is written to allow internal modifcation and use without requiring release of your modifications, but it seems this allowance is based on the belief that a piece of software used on a foreign machine can never monopolize a market segment. But what if all the applications are network-based? A company that is building an entire suite of networked apps that always run on THEIR servers effectively sidesteps the GPL's requirements of participation in a source-sharing community. Clearly Google is a more honest company than most (Motto: Don't be evil.), but it's not a non-profit. Things to consider...
Works With Wine (Score:3, Interesting)
Two gthumbs up for that!
Mark
Migrating to Picasa from another photo mgmt suite? (Score:2, Interesting)
Bow down (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Picasa (Score:2, Interesting)
See today's LA times for a look into Google's "make/buy cool stuff and give it away" methodology:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google18jan1 8,0,2075292.story [latimes.com]
Dumb Question (Score:1, Interesting)
That's all well and good, but I'd like to have it saved on disk in case I need to reinstall and I lose the link.
Does anyone know of the full download?
Linux Version?!? (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist... (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, what if User X used the redeye tool to successfully and satisfactorially remove redeye from a random image, and all of the data regarding how the software did the redeye fix and the data about whe sent to Google anonymously. This data could then be used, for example, by a relatively basic artificial intelligence image processing algorithm in order to be able to use it to determine the best way to de-red-eye an image.
Anonymous image data of such magnitude could be immensely useful.
Re:What's in a name? (Score:2, Interesting)
I didn't like the name the first day, but after that it grew on me. At least it's original. When this product was introduced it essentially created a new category (photo organizers) in software -- ACDSee was one of very few pre-existing products that supposedly does the same thing (on Winders).