Techthrob.com

Google’s Picasa software is a powerful tool for managing your photo collection. It provides a simple interface for organizing your pictures, as well as some easy-to-use, yet powerful image manipulation tools. However, until recently the Windows version of Picasa has had some features that put it above the Linux version; some of these features, like Picasa Web Album integration, are at the core of the program, without which Picasa isn’t very useful. With its newest release, the Linux version is being brought up to par with its Windows counterpart.

Picasa 2.7 is still in beta, so it isn’t included in many repositories just yet. However, Google provides easy-to-install packages in RPM and DEB formats on their download site.

The major new feature in Picasa 2.7 is integration with Picasa Web Albums, but we’ll get to that later; there are a plethora of other upgrades that make this new version worth getting excited about.

Save/revert edits
Picasa has some great image manipulation features. You can apply basic filters, as well as fine-tune an image based on fill lighting, highlights, shadows, and color temperature. There are also several effects you can use, such as sharpening, tinting, saturation, and others.

Picasa now allows you to save these edits either to the original file, or to create a new image with the modifications. More importantly, however, is the “revert” option, if you decide the original was better than the modified version.

View images by folders
One of my favorite features is the ability to find and sort files by their location in the filesystem, rather than sorting by albums in a library. This allows you to use your existing filing method to sort your pictures, rather than forcing you to create an entirely new system to use Picasa. A small change, but a very useful one nonetheless.

Better camera importing
Along with the ability to use your existing folder structure for picture imports, Picasa now allows you to import images from your digital camera using this filesystem structure. Google has also added better RAW support; you can read more about these features on Google’s website.

And now the feature we’ve all been waiting for – web album integration – is finally here! And I have to say that the implementation is as straight-forward and simple as it could possibly be.

Once you’ve logged into your Picasa Web Albums account, you’ll see your account information in the upper right corner of the screen:

Now, you’ll be able to create web albums, upload images, and manage existing albums via the Picasa desktop interface. Right-clicking on an image gives a contextual menu that will allow you to upload the image to your web gallery:

Clicking this item will open the Web Album manager, which lets you choose the option of adding the image to an existing album, or to create a new album.

All in all, the new interface for managing, uploading, and modifying Picasa Web Albums is a great improvement, and one that has been sorely lacking in the Linux version of Picasa for some time. With this new feature, Picasa for Linux becomes, in my opinion, the easiest to use photo management and web gallery software available for linux.

There are quite a few imaging programs for Linux. FSpot and Gphoto are two that come immediately to mind; and while they’re good programs, I have to say that Picasa has really began to mature, and is starting to impress me as a possible complete replacement for these other image cataloging programs. Of course, unlike its alternatives, Picasa is a closed-source application (not to mention, it runs via Wine on Linux), so there are several licensing as well as philosophical issues to be dealt with before Picasa becomes the default image manager for any Linux distribution.

If you’re thinking about trying out this new version of Picasa on your production machine, it’s not a decision you should take lightly. There are quite a few known bugs listed on the Google Picasa for Linux page, and even though most of them fall into the “vaguely annoying” catagory, it’s probably best to wait until the official release until you upgrade. If you just have to have the latest version – and you’re especially excited about the web album integration – I don’t think it’d be too harmful to try out this beta. Just remember that there will be bugs!