Yesterday I downloaded and started playing with Picasa 2. I had actually just started to get in to using the previous version I had installed, which was 1.68. Well I am happy to say that version 2 is a big improvement. It struck me that when I first started using Picasa that google had really put together (bought) a good product. Picasa, is the Windows version of iPhoto. Now that is a good thing. Apple makes great software and there is a huge gap between what Apple users have and Windows users have available. Yes, there are more "titles" for the PC, the got to have applications that just work on the Apple usually don't have an PC equivent. I mean, Apple ended up writing iTunes for PC. I brillant move if you ask me. Anyhow back to Picasa. What I really like about this program is that is will just go and auto-discover all of your digital images, group them in a album for you, and then let you do what you want from there. It does a lot of the heavy lifting if Digital Photo Managment. One of the new features is captions. This is really a nice feature, because ther are certian images that I refer to by a title or a caption. I don't know about you, but I usually never call an image by it's file name. The creators of the program know that, so not only do you have captions, you also have keywords. Now keywords were in the previous version of the program, and were seemingly easier to add, because there was a keyword button near the image you were working on. Well once you get use to control + k when you want to add a keyword, it is the same interface as the previous version and just as quick. I like the addition of a search field in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This search works just the way I like it do. It shows results as you type. X1 for windows, and the next version of Mac OS X spotlight as well as iTunes use this same method and to me this is the ideal way of searching. Another big add to the applications is support for RAW file format. RAW is the file format used by some of the new higher end digital cameras. In short google has given us a really nice PCE version of iPhoto that is really usable, and in which you don't have to have a B.S. in computer science to use, oh, and the best part, it's free!
