Picasa: the Good and the Bad

If you like photos, and you need to crop, edit out the red eyes, or just do basic effects on your pics but you have only 256MB of RAM and a 700MHz processor, making your Adobe Photoshop experience a worse pain than having a wisdom tooth grow out, then Google Picasa is the answer for you.

It is a relatively lighter photo archiving and editing program which allows you to do a lot of the basic functions of a photo editor and more, without the annoying lag time on an ancient machine.

Compared to Adobe Photoshop, it is better in some aspects, namely:

• It has photo archiving and organizing functions.
• It has a media detector. As soon as new media is detected on removable media or on the hard drive as it is introduced into the OS, the media detector opens an option to add the files to the library.
• It is much, much lighter on the system: it loads faster, and the editing on a low-juice (low RAM, low CPU speed) machine takes less jugular vein popping than Adobe Photoshop.

What I really like about Picasa is that it:

• Takes less brain cells to edit pictures.
• It has a clean interface that evokes calmness and peace.
• As I said, it is faster and lighter than Adobe Photoshop.
• You can publish your photos automatically to your blog.

However, there are drawbacks, and it does have photo editing limitations, as compared to Adobe Photoshop.

• Sometimes, the archiving is messy. The media organizing gets messy because of the automatic archiving. Picasa just assigns directories, especially if you’re clueless about how to operate it, as a first-time user.
• The interface is too complicated for me, sometimes.
• When you’ve edited or organized photos from Picasa, it creates and embeds extra files in folders. So unless you chose to hide the system files, it gets annoying and paranoia-inducing to see the files. Not to mention they take up hard drive space. Well, it’s only around 1KB anyway, but still. As for inducing paranoia, if you are allergic to malware, and if you didn’t realize that that system file was Picasa’s, you’d think that it’s one of those viruses that overrun your system with desktop.ini files.
• It is not available for Mac and Linux! Having wiped out all traces of Microsoft Windows from my desktop, I cannot use Picasa anymore. I don’t even know whether I can run Picasa from a Windows emulator on Linux or OS X. So sad. My only consolation is that Windows 98 boxes can’t use it either.

Its system requirements are:

• 300MHz processor
• 64 MB RAM (128MB is better)
• 50 MB available hard disk space (better if it’s 100MB)
• 800 × 600 pixels, 16 bit color monitor.
• Microsoft® Windows 2000, or Microsoft® Windows XP.
• Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.01 or better (6.0 is better).
• Microsoft® DirectX 7.0 or higher (8.1 ships with XP, DirectX 9.0b is better for Picasa).
• Optional: 56K Internet connection speed or better (for access to any online services).

Overall, Picasa is a fair program. It may lack the fine photo editing features of Adobe Photoshop, but it packs punch nonetheless. If you want to auto-publish on the Internet, organize and archive your photos, and do simple editing and tweaking on your pics, Google Picasa is a fine program to give you these and more.

Try Picasa yourself and let me know waht you think, it’s part of the free Google Pack –