Digital Image Management with Picasa

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Reported by Kristine Fowler

Truth be told, I was probably the last of my friends and family to move away from traditional film-based photography. I mention this because believe it or not, everyone thought that with my background (I work with computers every day) and overall comfort with technology, that I should have been the first. So what held me back? There were a few things, but by far the biggest one was.....File Management. I just couldn't get my head around how I was going to deal with storing my digital files in a manner that was safe and easy to manage...and so I waited.

As luck would have it (if you can call it luck), about 2 years ago I needed to replace my camera. My trusty 35mm film friend had finally bitten the dust -- and so I started to shop around, did a little research and decided that it was time I took the digital plunge. All things considered, I'm really glad that I did make the switch, but what about the issue of file management? How did I decide to deal with the chaos? I found my solution in Picasa.

Picasa is a free, downloadable image management software product from Google. You can get a copy for yourself here. That's right, it's free -- no catch and it's not a trial version. It's a fully functioning product that is available at no cost to you. Interesting to note is that prior to Google acquiring it, Picasa was a regular for-purchase product, that came with a hefty pricetag -- so don't be concerned about the fact that it's free.

It is worth pointing out at the front-end of this review one of the common misconceptions about Picasa. Picasa DOES NOT STORE your photos. It simply acts as a cataloging/viewing/editing window. It helps you manage your library. It is true that some of the things you do in Picasa make changes to files and folders on your hard disk, but since it does not store your photos you can try it at no risk. If you download it, then choose to remove it later, none of your photos will be lost.

Despite the fact that it's free, the software does get updated occasionally, and users are notified of an available update when the product is launched. Picasa collects feedback from users through their online help forums seeking to learn what is working (and perhaps not working) with the product, and learns what features should be considered additions to future software release. In fact, wouldn't you know it I was mid-review and the folks at Google announced that Picasa Rev 3 is now availble in Beta. Unfortunately, I tried to download it and it doesn't look like it's available to me yet. Hmmmm. I'll have to try again later. So, if you do decide to download Picasa and see things a little bit differently than what you see here, don't worry. That's probably the reasoning. Reading the deets on the new rev makes it sound even better than what I've been working with to date, so it's all good.

So back to my review. According to Picasa, here's the basics of what it can do for you.

• Locate and Organize all the photos on your computer.
• Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
• Share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web

So let's look at each of these things in detail.

Locate and Organize Your Photos

Once you start Picasa, it scans your computer's hard drive to find and automatically organize all of your photos (and movies) into a Library View. Here is a sample of what you might see.




On the left hand side of the screen is your Folder List which shows all of the folders on your computer that contain photos and movies, as well as all of the albums you've created in Picasa. By default the folder list is sorted by creation date but you have the option of changing this to sort by folder Name, Folder Size, or in order of most recent updates, whatever will work best for you.

The right hand side of the screen displays thumbnail images of the photos and movies in the highlighted folder (and neighboring folders if space permits). Thumbnails can be resized to meet the user's preference using the slider at the bottom of the screen - or through the "View" menu. Double-clicking on a photo launches a the "View and Edit" window for the chosen photo (more on that below).

Double-clicking a folder name in either the left or right pane views opens a dialog box containing the the name of the folder (editable), the date the folder was created (editable) as well as blanks for the user to input information about the location of the photos, and a description of the photos contained in the folder. Once added, descriptive information becomes searchable by Picasa and will make finding photos easier as your image library grows.

It should be noted that changing the name of a folder within Picasa also changes the name of the folder as it is stored on your hard drive - editing the date however does not seem to have the same affect. Windows explorer maintains the original create date of the folder in question.

From the Picasa library view you can also adjust which folders appear in Picasa - that is you can Remove Folders from Picasa (doing this does not remove them from your hard drive, only from the Picasa library, kind of like hiding them from the software), drag and drop to move photos from one folder to another (changing the actual location of the original file), and if you like you can use Picasa to delete photos from your computer using the Delete From Disk option or simply pressing the delete key on your keyboard (whenever you delete from disk you are reminded with a confirmation prompt that your hard disk will be affected).

I'll talk more about the area/buttons at the bottom of the Library View screen later on.

Another great organizational feature of Picasa is the ability to group photos into albums. This means that if the folders on your hard drive are organized with the date taken as the folder name (which is a common way for digital cameras to download pictures) - you can drag pictures into albums within Picasa, grouping for example all of the photos from a 3-day weekend in one place. Or....you can create an album that contains only photos of a specific member of your family, or a specific sport, or a specific location and so on. Photos can reside in more than one album and albums exist only in Picasa. They do not physically exist on your computer. So by placing photos in albums you can categorize them without duplicating the file on your hard drive, so you are not wasting any precious storage space. In the simplest form, think of albums like you would a "playlist" on your iPod. The songs are still stored in their original location, with the Playlist acting like a table of contents as to their location. Important to remember though is that any edits you make to photos in a Album, will be made to all instances of that photo in Picasa, including the original. If you want to make different edits to the same photo in different albums, you will need to duplicate the photo first.

Edit and Add Effects to Your Locate and Organize Your Photos

Built into Picasa are various photo editing tools. The "Edit Photo" screen is easily accessed by double-clicking on a thumbnail in the Library View.


Here is a close-up of the three photo editing menus.

Basic Fixes include Crop, Straighten, Redeye Reduction, a one-step adjustment button called "I'm Feeling Lucky", Auto Contrast, Auto Color, and a Fill Light adjustment tool. Here is a sample of a photo that I edited using the "I'm Feeling Lucky" option. I think you'll agree that there is certainly a difference in the coloring. The function removed the yellowish hue caused by the bright sun that was captured on the original and made the colors look what I believe to be more realistic.

Before

After

There are more tools on the tuning tab which again includes Fill Light as well as slider adjustments for Highlights, Shadows and Color Temperature. There is also a Neutral Color Picker which tells Picasa which part of your photo it should consider gray or white. Picasa then color balances around it.

On the Effects tab there are twelve effects that you can apply to any still photo. They are Sharpen, Sepia, Black & White, Warmify, Film Grain, Tint, Saturation, Soft Focus, Glow, Filtered Black & White, Focal Black & White, and Graduated Tint.

Here is a sample of a pic changed to Sepia.

Captioning.....is one of my favorite tools on the photo editing screen and are added in a field below the photo (see red circle in this thumbnail). While at first the length of the line looks a bit restrictive, multi-line captions are permitted which is great. This means that if you wanted to you could prepare your journaling in advance of creating a scrapbook page layout while the photos, and memories are still fresh in your mind. Since the caption is stored with the photo itself within Picasa, you don't have to worry about losing little strips of paper, or sticky notes. For unorganized folk like me this is a big plus! The downside to the captioning is that currently there is no way for you to print your captions along with your photos - not even in a contact sheet format. So in order to print your journaling, you will need to go back into Picasa and cut and paste your caption to a text editor then print.

One more quick word about captions. If you add a caption within Picasa, and then email the picture to someone else, because the caption is written to the camera's EXIF data, the recipient will see the caption if they too use Picasa or other image editing or management software products that are capable of reading EXIF information. EXIF data and captions are also transmitted by Picasa to Picasa Web Albums for online file sharing. Keep this feature in mind though if you're sharing photos and remember not to write a caption that you wouldn't necessarily want anyone else to see!

Create Watermarks on Your Photos

When I started to write this review, I had the inability to watermark a photo listed as a 'con' BUT, I'm happy to see from the latest report (despite the fact that I have so far been unable to download the product) that the newest release - Picasa 3 - contains this functionality. Yippee! This means that if you post photos to your blog or another photo sharing site, you can now add your copyright to the photo from within Picasa.

Create Movies & Slideshows

Another cool feature built right into Picasa is the ability to create slideshows and movies from your photos at the click of a button. Of course, you don't have a lot of movie editing options (for this you'll need a proper movie maker program), but in a pinch this little feature makes sharing your photos with family and friends a little bit more interesting. Here's a quick sample that I put together in less than a minute using a few photos I took in my sister-in-law's garden a few months back. (Just don't ask how long it took to load this file to Blogger, a process that I eventually abandoned. Suffice it to say it was a lot longer than the time it took for me to create it --- I hope this embedded version from Flickr works instead and that my efforts were worth it for demonstration purposes! Geesh!) If you can't see the video -- click here to jump to it's page on Flickr.

SampleSlideshow
Originally uploaded by Scramping Addict

View Your Photos in a Timeline

If you're searching for something specific and it doesn't jump off the screen at you right away, and if you haven't taken the time to enter a searchable caption or description of your pics, the quickest way to find what you're looking for would be to jump into Picasa's timeline view. The Timeline view lets you instantaneously scroll through a chronological catalog of your photos - fast forwarding and rewinding as necessary. If you need further details on the contents on an album, you can view a slideshow of that specific album in your timeline, you need to simply doubleclick one of the thumbnails.

Here is a screen capture of my timeline view so you can hopefully get a better idea of what I mean. I use this quite a bit to find older pics when I'm not sure what folder I have stored them in (most of my newer photos have captions and/or folder descriptions which I can search).

Share Your Photos

I mentioned earlier that there was some additional stuff at the bottom of the Library View screen. This stuff is all about sharing -- and after all, isn't that what we all want to do with our photos in one manner or another? Here is a close-up of what you can find there.

The left-most section is your photo-tray and this is definately one of the handiest tools I've seen in a long time. As you work with photos in either the Library View or Edit Photo Views, you can 'hold' them in your photo tray for processing later. Any of the function buttons to the right of the photo tray will act on everything you have in your photo tray at the same time when clicked. If you want to process an entire folder, you simply add the whole folder to the tray.

So what are the funtion buttons? Essentially they are all geared to preparing or sharing your photos outside of Picasa. They are Web Album, Email, Print, Order Prints, Blog This, Collage and Export. Most of the features are pretty self-explanatory but I do want to comment on a couple of them.

Web Album - Similar to other photo sharing sites like Flickr for example, Picasa Web Albums allow you to post and share your photos online. Clicking the button prompts you to create a Picasa Web Album account (or log on to an existing one) and then either add your photos to an existing album, or create a new one, enter an album description and/or set privacy settings. While the review of Picasa Web Albums could be a whole article entirely unto itself, suffice it to say at this point that having the button 'inside' Picasa is a real time saver when it comes to uploading if you decide to use this service.

Blog This - Connects your photo with your Blogger-powered blog, taking you directly to edit mode of a new blog post with the photo already embedded.

Export - This is my personal favorite bottom tray feature button. This button takes all of the photos in your tray, and creates a new directory on your computer's hard disk containing only these photos, including their edits. I use this all the time to generate the CDs I take to the processing shop for printing. I 'Export' them to a new folder, and then use Windows Explorer and CD writing software to transfer the contents of this new folder to a CD. I have found this to be much more efficient burning process than my having to sift through several folders of photos in Explorer to find the photos I wish to print. Once I have created the CD, I delete the exported folder from my PC. Since the photos inside are a 'copy' of those already stored elsewhere on the drive and I also have the CD to rely on there is no need to keep the export folder.

Collage -- There are a couple of different options included in this one, but here's a 30 second photo-grid collage that I made with some pictures I took on Canada Day just so you get a basic idea.

So what's the bottom line?

Pros:

• It's free!
• Picasa does not store your photos it is simply a file manangement tool. So if for some reason you need to uninstall Picasa, your files and folders remain intact on your PC.
• On initial run, Picasa finds photos and movies that you may have forgotten that you had stored on your hard disk since it scans everything.
• Edits to photos are made and effects are added in progressive layers, and you can always undo or redo the edits/effects in the reverse order they are made. (i.e you can remove the last 3 edits/effects by hitting the undo button 3 times).
• Picasa keeps a copy of your original image file and 'hides' it in a sub-folder called 'Originals' in the same folder as your edited version resides on your hard disk. This way you can always revert back to the original file if necessary.

• While not as sophisticated as specialty image editing applications like Adobe Photoshop, Picasa gives you ample options to adjust, edit, and add effects to your photographs.
• Picasa supports a plethora of photo and movie file types including (photo: JPG, JPEG, GIF, TIF, PSD, PNG, BMP, RAW - including NEF and CRW, GIF and PNG files and movie: MPG, ANI, ASF, WMV and MOV)
• Picasa has a built-in utility for 'backing-up' your photos and album structure. While I have not tried this yet, I can at this point only assume that it works. I do know that unless you have exported edited photos to a new folder and essentially created new photo files, that the backup process will backup your original files only, without the edits. The file that stores the edits, which is seperate from the actual photo will be backed up also, but the edits will be visible only to Picasa, not to a Windows photo-viewer type program.
• I use an external hard drive to store the majority of my photos, and since Picasa is set to always scan this drive, Picasa detects and scans it when it is available displaying the photo on both the external and internal drive in the Library View.
• Create a slideshow, a gift CD or collage of photos at the click of a button. It really couldn't be any easier than that.
• Picasa is a work in progress which means there are software updates from time to time. When an update becomes available, you are notified when you launch the product that a new version is available.

Cons:

• Cannot print your captions with your photos.
• Picasa doesn't always prompt you for confirmation when a change being made in Picasa that will affect how or where a file is stored on your hard disk. (e.g. moving a file from one folder to another generates a confirmation prompt whereas renaming a folder does not - both of these actions make changes to the files on your hard drive)
• There is no printable help manual that I can find, but there is a comprehensive online help center. A printable manual might be better for those people who aren't connected to the internet 100% of the time.

Overall, I rate Picasa a 10 out of 10 (and I don't tend to do that very often). While the new user may find it a wee bit confusing to figure out what actually does make changes to your hard disk files and what does not, and just how to maximize some of the program's features, with a little practice they'll be an expert in no time. Quite honestly, I am simply amazed that this product is free from Google. It has all of the power of it's more expensive image management counterparts. You know what they say....the best things in life are free....and this couldn't be truer than with Picasa.

Have you tried Picasa to manage your digital image files or movies? How do you think it compares to some of the other products out there? Leave us a comment and let us know!