More on Picasa
After using Picasa 2 for a few more days, I feel that I am well equipped to make some suggestions on how it can be improved. On the positive side, I have discovered a few new features and I should probably talk about those as well.
Let’s first talk about the improvements.
- The program seems to crash when I play a video and I hit the back button on my mouse or the “Back to Library” button. The problem doesn’t seem to happen if I pause the video first. It’s always good to have a workaround.
- I wish Picasa would support more image types. I’m pretty sure this will happen naturally from version to version. I should probably engage Google and see if I can make some kind of product suggestion. In particular, I wish they supported Adobe Illustrator files and layed Photoshop files.
- Assigning labels is way too onerous. The drag and drop is nice, but it should be even faster. I think most people will typically assign labels based on family member names like “Marco”, “Antonio” and “Giovanni”. It would be great if I could assign hot keys like Alt+1 to a label, like “Giovanni”.
Now for the new features. These features were there all along, I simply didn’t invoke them when I wrote my last review.
- The image backup feature is cool. I’m testing it now with some of my DVD-RW media. It can easily span DVD’s and this is handy since my image collection is about 8.4GB.
- Background jobs are handled with a cool status window that sits on top of your desktop (and all windows for that matter). It looks like this:
- Labels. I’m starting to use them but before I got sucked into an all-night job of labeling thousands of photos, I stopped myself. I do wish I could filter on “unlabeled” photos so I can make a few passes efficiently. I think Adobe Album shows a small label icon on top of images that have labels. In Picasa, there is nothing.
More to come as I learn more…
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