Google finally got around to adding a natural extension to its Microsoft Windows application Picasa. It added a web component to the saving function — namely, network-based image storage. In other words, you can simply just right click on an album or an image and it will automatically save it to your web space on a Google server. Take a look at my Picasa web album for an example.
It gives you a friendly web address, based on your Google login name, so you can share your photos with friends. It also gives you the ability to have ‘private’ albums so the whole world doesn’t have access to them either. The best part of the product is the end-to-end seamless integration of the pc application and the web site. If you already use Picasa to organize and label your photos then it seems like a no-brainer to use this new Google application. It automatically uses the labels for your photos on the web and creates albums on the web based off your album names in Picasa. No more entering the same thing twice — once on your computer and then again on the web!
It has a few flaws though, and I hope some of them will be addressed quickly:
- Amazingly enough, there is no search function within your web albums. Google , king of search, is lacking a search function. Unbelievable. One must assume that this feature will be coming shortly.
- The security on web albums is really weak — ’security through obscurity’. If someone guesses the right album name then there nothing else preventing someone from seeing them. One could defend it by saying that they could make some long random string for the album name and that’s the same as a password, but they methodology for uploading albums doesn’t really lend itself that way. Why not just allow people to organize things natually, name the album appropriately, and then allow a separate password?
- The Picasa program needs a few more items for its ‘Preferences’ page so that you don’t have to continuously confirm the same parameters for photo uploads. As annoying as it is, its still much less annoying than having to retype all the photo information again if you use some other tool. [Note: I have Gallery2 configured on my site, and have used Gallery Remote to load photos into it. In just a couple days, I loaded more photos into Picasa Web Albums than I've loaded into Gallery2 in months, with considerable less effort.] A few addition options and loading photos will be much more seamless.
So would I still recommend it? Most certianly. The few flaws will most likely be addessed, and none are so bad to make the product useless or more trouble than its worth.
