Review: Google Picasa 2

Picasa is a free Google application for managing digital photos and, like most of the software reviewed here, also offers basic editing features.

The layout and design is clean and simple and ideally suited to those who would rather spend time looking at their photos than delving into the Exif metadata.

When you first start Picasa you are given the option of searching your entire PC or only certain folders for pictures.

Unlike earlier versions, Picasa 2 maintains the link to files on your hard disk, so if you rename, move or delete photos within Picasa, the original files on disk are amended.

The ‘Folders on Disk’ collection displays imported folders, but not the folder tree. This can be confusing if you have several subfolders with the same name, such as ‘holiday’, in different folders, for example 2002, 2003 etc. In Picasa they just appear as holiday (1), holiday (2) and so on.

Picasa can organise pictures into collections based on labels. You can, for example, create a label for all of your fishing photos, or all photos of your mum or, your mother’s hobbies permitting, both.

Newly created labels are added to a pulldown list and can easily be applied to individual or multiple photo selections. There’s also a simple rating system that allows you to attach a single gold star to favourite photos.

Embedded Exif metadata looks as if it’s a bit of an afterthought, but you can display exposure and other camera data in the Properties dialogue box and IPTC keywords are supported.

Picasa maintained the existing keywords in our import images, adding new ones was straightforward and all were embedded in exported pictures.

As you’d expect from Google, Picasa’s search features are exemplary.

As soon as you type anything in the search field it goes to work displaying those photos that contain the term in the filename, labels, or Exif data – even with a large collection the search results are displayed virtually instantaneously.

This article is part of a group test of photo album software
See also
ACDSee 8 Photo Manager
Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0
Corel Photo Album 6
Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006
Serif Album Plus 4
IPTC and keywords

The table of features can be read via our pdf downloads above