Entered CNET Catalog: 01/19/2005
SKU: CNETPICASA2.0
Manufacturer: Lifescape Solutions Inc.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 01/18/2005
Upside: Drawing upon the vast engineering resources within Google, Picasa has transformed itself into a very intuitive app. For example, you see each edit you make to a photo in real time instead of waiting for the preview image to render. Want to send a photo to your blogger.com site? Direct integration makes it possible to snap a photo and post it on your site within minutes. Want to find all images with cats on your hard drive? Picasa's search quickly pulls those images together, using a variety of methods, including hunting for EXIF data contained with the digital image itself. The new edition of Picasa also burns albums to your computer's DVD or CD burner, something missing in earlier versions. For hard copies, Picasa links out to several well-known services, such as Ofoto and Shutterfly, meaning you don't have to open yet another print service account to make hard copies of photos edited in Picasa.
Downside: Picasa 2.0 is available only for Windows and only in English. Other languages may be available later. There's also a slight performance drag on older computers running Picasa 2.0.
Outlook: Given that Picasa 2.0 is free and easily downloadable from Google, the outlook looks fantastic for this very easy-to-use photo album app. You'd be nuts not to give Picasa 2.0 a try.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38out of 38 user reviews
Absolutely Amazing
Pros: So easy to use
Cons: None so far
This is the most amazing, no less free, piece of software that I have encountered in sometime. In under 4 minutes Picasa organized all my photos and presented thumbnail views of them all, organized by folder name. Turns out they were spread over 27 folders! There are intuitive commands to hide, delete, or move a folder or picture. Editing a photo just couldn't be easier. I have used different photo editing software before but nothing this easy and intuitive - and remember - free!
This is my first impression! I have yet to explore Picasa's many other great features and tools.
Watch out Microsoft, Google is sneaking up on your turf.
out of 38 user reviews
Very good and easy, however...
Pros: Interface and smooth organization
Cons: Importing Photos
Here's the issue:
When importing, after clicking finish, the dialog box that appears has two flaws that result in the inadvertent deletion of photos.
1. The check box for deleting photos should NOT be checked by default. The box should be empty and allow the user to select the deletion of the photos following importation.
2. When importing only a subset of all the photos on a memory card, checking the box "delete photos after import" DOES NOT REFER ONLY TO THE SELECTED PHOTOS AS ONE MIGHT EASILY UNDERSTAND IT TO MEAN. IN FACT, IF YOU IMPORT ONLY 2 OF 200 PHOTOS AND EXCLUDE THE REMAINING 198, IF THE DELETION BOX IS CHECKED, ALL 200 PHOTOS--NOT JUST THE TWO SELECTED--WILL BE DELETED. This does not provide for multiple sequential imports to different folders of photos from a variety of occasions.
This seems the more serious issue. Why would a user understand that one small check box refers to the ALL THE PHOTOS ON THE MEMORY CARD, when the rest of the fields in the dialog box refer only to the photos currently being imported from the card?
As designed currently, the dialog box seems to be intentionally or negligently designed with the specific purpose of tricking users into deleting photos they wish to keep.
out of 38 user reviews
Picasa is the best of breed in photo org/mgt software for the PC
Pros: Picasa is the iPhoto of the Windows world
Cons: Picasa is bit bulky build wise...
out of 38 user reviews
Simply the best!
Pros: Fast, Easy to use, FREE
Cons: Memory requirements.
out of 38 user reviews
Powerful free software - download it
Pros: Extensive image enhancing options that work very well, interface is outstanding
Cons: Picasa will slow older machines down
out of 38 user reviews
Great fun, easy to use interface, great tools for editing
Pros: Easy to use, integrates well with GMail, a delight to use when emailing as it reduces the file to a sensible size, good enough features for the amateur, red eye and cropping very good. Automatic enhan
Cons: Just be careful what folder options you specify for it to scan the first time you use it. I said all folders and lo and behold I got every jpeg on my hard drive.
Emailing was especially made easy, gives you the options to send through all the email programmes you have. Example a 1.2MB jpeg was resized just for emailing to 46kb.
Even the professional would get a kick out of this, as its so quick and easy to use
out of 38 user reviews
Excellent Program
Pros: Totally Free
Cons: None that I can see
out of 38 user reviews
Pretty Viewer, Lousy Blogging Tool
Pros: Easy viewer for Net Newbys
Cons: Barely usable with blogger.com (Blogspot)
But certain features were always buggered up. The refresh of the catalog took a long time. Many pictures were totally lost in the Picasa file system and still are, even though I can easily find them with Windows Explorer.
"Hello" was designed to give users a choice of either Picasa (now Picasa2) or Windows Explorer to choose photos. Well, something has gone very wrong since I can't use Explorer to send anything now. It will only send images found with Picasa2...and as mentioned earlier, Picasa2 stinks on the cataloging side of the street. If "Hello," which is the sister program to Picasa, doesn't want to allow use of Windows Explorer, tell us and take away the interface. Don't just let us struggle with it.
Perhaps this criticism will finally get through to someone in either Blogger.com, Hello, or Picasa so they can make Windows Explorer usable again. Or make Picasa work more than half the time. Until then, I have discovered that a copy/paste function actually delivers a lot of smaller images to Blogspot without all the mess and bother of Picasa or Hello. I do not recommend either program at all.
The new release of Picasa has made leaps and bounds over the old one. It has taken out the 'middle man', the Hello service, and given a direct photo linkage to Blogspot, or blogger.com.
It's fast and easy, and has the best set of simple photo editors and enhancers I have seen.
I feel it is not enough to complain and grouse about a product's shortcomings if you don't praise it when it fixes them.
Today I would give it a 9/10
out of 38 user reviews
Even better than ACDsee
Pros: Free, better than ACDsee or anything else I've used
Cons: Nothing so far.. but I just started using it
Beginner or expert there is an incredible amount of features here for free.
out of 38 user reviews
Very user freindly. Great onboard help as well as online reference.
Pros: User freindly, quick and easy. If you have used Adobe Photoshop software and Microsoft Office 2003 Picture Manager and various other 3rd. party programs then this will be a pleasant change.
Cons: Did not find any worth mentioning.
out of 38 user reviews
excellent product best ever
Pros: easy to use powerful software for organizing photos allows easy searching through thousands of picture
Cons: none significant
the best out right now
and its FREEEEEE
out of 38 user reviews
Excellent and Intuitive Program
Pros: Intuitive, Fast, Small, Good Features, Free !!!
Cons: There are no cons that I have discovered so far !!!
I am a fairly advanced computer user, so I can handle complex programs, but Picasa's intuitiveness combined with it's medium-level features is a welcome change for me.
The interface is pleasant, and easy to understand. There is no learning curve whatsoever.
The library management and photo editing features are very comparable to expensive programs such as Adobe Photoshop Album. Even for the newest users, the editing tools make it very easy to make pics look their best.
And the direct integration with services such as Ofoto, and the direct link to Blogger.com is just the icing on the cake.
It is a great program overall, one that I would highly recommend.
Try it !!
Mohit
out of 38 user reviews
EXCELLENT photo gallery program
Pros: great interface, works with blogger
Cons: to email photo must use outlook; picasa or google
You can use most popular email clients to one click send pictures....
out of 38 user reviews
I wish everything could work this nice.
Pros: Besides the cost.. not enough time to list it all.
Cons: I'll let you know if I find any.
out of 38 user reviews
Better than Photoshop Album
Pros: Better than PSA for basic editing. Very easy to use, very intuitive. Great program and it's free.
Cons: None so far
out of 38 user reviews
Passed the Father Test
Pros: My dad used to call me all the time asking me how to deal with different issues surrounding digital photos I took while on vacation. With birth of my first child and my mother's desire for as many pictures as I can send I started looking at Photo organiz
Cons: Getting new photos into the library with out getting every single image from every program can be a bit time consuming.
out of 38 user reviews
Beautiful App
Pros: Looks great and works very well. Better than iPhoto IMO.
Cons: Don't like the slideshow much. It will force pictures to expand to full screen when they are clearly too small - pixelation results. Maybe I missed something here.
out of 38 user reviews
Does the basics with ease
Pros: Very intuitive and reasonably fast. Real time views and easy undo make it easy to experiment with different editing techniqes.
Cons: Does not have a lot of high end features. Using open with feature on a photo (as opposed to opening software first) a bit of a pain.
out of 38 user reviews
Google is taking over the world
Pros: This product is easy to use and has a simple and effective interface and it free! the average home user should be content with its ease of use.
Cons: As they said before, the editing options are minimal so all you hardcore photo geeks need to break out photoshop.
out of 38 user reviews
Casual Photographer's Dream
Pros: Ease of use - A-1. Great for one-click corrections to lighting problems and other "errors". Readily recovers photos that are originally too dark. Not perfect, but album quality.
Cons: Limited corrections. Not for professional use.
out of 38 user reviews
best free photo editor... Photoshop watch out
Pros: awesome album features you can display all photos on a timeline
Cons: kind of slow on older computers
out of 38 user reviews
great for home users
Pros: it works, has most features regular users will need.
Cons: The pro's will still need photoshop to edit pic's.
out of 38 user reviews
Easy to use and very practical
Pros: * Good storage facility * Easy to trace folders * Software reduces red-eye effect
Cons: * Not enough editing facility
out of 38 user reviews
good and free
Pros: easy to use and free.
Cons: Personally I perfere Microsoft Picture it 10, picture it has a few extras I like, however you have to pay for it, picasa is good and is free.
out of 38 user reviews
The best, free photo software!
Pros: It is very easy to use. There's no deep-level menus. Practically everything is just 1 or 2 clicks away. It also doesn't consume too much disk space. The Camedia Master I *had* took 100MB, while this little baby just takes 50MB.
Cons: There aren't a lot of options to edit the photos.
out of 38 user reviews
Very nearly perfect
Pros: Quick access to my thousands of photos means that everything old is new again - pictures I had no reason to ever see are now a click away. Sharing is made (generally pretty) easy, whether by email, sending to print service, or generating HTML.
Cons: Features I pine for: improved metadata input (ability to tab to buttons in the "Keywords" dialog, greater access to EXIF data); ability to convert tiff and png photos to jpeg when sending to a print service with per-picture upload size limits.
out of 38 user reviews
Great tool, weak access
Pros: This is a great tool for viewing and editing albums. the interface is "almost" very simple. Go Google Go!
Cons: Major Interface Faux-pas: if you have your own folder structure, you'll loose it! I don't know why it would not give you the option to view pics through your own folder set up. It's my structure...and I like it that way!
out of 38 user reviews
I can't believe this is free
Pros: Intuitive interface and easy browse features. As somebody that is already tech savvy, I initially felt that this program is for the techno challenged. On the contrary, this program is for anyonbody that wants to get to the next level of easy efficient com
Cons: RAM intensive graphics a la OS X. Just make sure you're not running lean on the memory.
out of 38 user reviews
Excellent user interface
Pros: Doesn't copy or move your photos, no duplicates. The search function tries to make its best by searching from EXIF data embedded in the JPG photos.
Cons: If you have created a logical folder structure for your photos, you'll miss that.
out of 38 user reviews
Seems useful but doesn't work.
Pros: Nice interface. Very intuitive controls. Many of useful "extras".
Cons: PHOTO EDITING TOOLS DESTROY COLOR OF ORIGINAL PICTURES!!! The pictures look great inside the program but when you look at them outside the program, they are ruined. I am sure they will fix this but for now, stay away.
out of 38 user reviews
Just downloaded and Install, Love it.
Pros: Easier to find photos than using MY Pictures. Basic touchup and editing as good as lower end paid for software.
Cons: Don't know yet.
out of 38 user reviews
Excellent photo organizer and presentor
Pros: Excellent import tool, wonderfull grouping/date function. PErfect presentation. Simple to use
Cons: setting up wo it doesn;t scan your entire drive for updates is a bit combersom
out of 38 user reviews
Great little program
Pros: My pictures are all over the place on my hard drive. Picasa lets you sorts folders by year which is really convienent (I can find a set of pictures I took at a party in 2001 in about 3 seconds). The red eye reduction is very useful (never figured out an e
Cons: I'm not a big fan of any program being active in my system tray when I'm not using it. (cough, realplayer, cough)
out of 38 user reviews
Try it - it's free!
Pros: For ease of use alone this product is worth it. Will be able to do most things (organize, slideshow, clean up, crop, burn to cd/dvd, label, print etc.) that 95% of the people want to do to pictures anyway. And you can't beat the price!
Cons: None so far.
out of 38 user reviews
all good reviews are bogus!
Pros: o'kay it is free all good reviews are written by google employees.
Cons: who cares about "pretty" interface if the product does not do much. Don't expect to be able to create albums, edit pictures, use your scanner or anything we all do with our pictures. Right here on www.download.com there are better products. I would recomm
out of 38 user reviews
Every Digital Camera User Should Download Picasa 2.0
Pros: Fast, intuitive, and very easy to use.
Cons: Not powerful enough for experts, but more than adequate for average users.
out of 38 user reviews
Really it's pretty good!
Pros: It does simple editing jobs well and will definitely suit home users with its ease of use and interface is a joy to look at. It's also very intuitive and well organized.
Cons: Hardcore photo editors won't be satisfied. This product is well suited to the average home user who just likes to take digital photo's and send them by e-mail to friends and family. Other than that its a very nice program.
out of 38 user reviews
Couldn't ask for any better for free!!
Pros: Detects new photos when media/camera inserted, great organization, email options, avi viewer, easy seach for file location on hdd
Cons: Can't choose your own online photo printing service
