Author: Mike Boesen
Last updated: 9 November 2005
Appendix 1 - Picasa2 Usage Tips
A copy of this article is on my web site. It could be worthwhile occasionally checking to see if it is more up to date than this article.
Picasa2 (“P2” hereinafter) is a freeware application from Google. You can download it from here. The version I am now using is 2.1.0 (build 27.60.0).
This article is a consolidation and update of the content in an article that I originally wrote for the July 2005 issue of the Canberra PC Users Group's magazine "Sixteen Bits" and a couple of subsequent articles. In the first article I reviewed the first release version of P2. Most of the contents of this article is still applicable to the first release; all of it is applicable to the latest (version 2.1) release.
While the first release of P2 was designed to work with Windows 98, Me, 2000 and XP, the Google web site states that the latest release (version 2.1) only works with Windows 2000 and XP. There must be an error in the Version 2.1 Help/About screen because it indicates suitability for all four operating systems. The inapplicability to 98 and Me is most unfortunate.
However, for the fortunate folk that have Windows 2000 or XP systems, version 2.1 is now available. However, I must say that I can't see very much difference at all between the original release and version 2.1. I have noted that the bug in the delete keywords function has been fixed.
The functionality of P2 is summarized on this Google web page. The functionality that I find particularly useful includes:
I first used P2 in preparing some CDs containing a selection of digital photos in JPG format which I wanted to send to some friends overseas. The reason I wanted a gift CD is that I did not want to assume that the recipients could download them from a Web site. I also did not want to make any assumptions about download speed and quota. However, I felt it safe to assume that they could play a CD on their PC at no cost to them.
At the time I first started to use P2, I was looking for an application that had these attributes:
More recently I have been using P2 mainly because it is an application that makes organizing and managing a collection of pictures (including FINDING the pictures that I have on my PC somewhere) and making quick fixes to them very easy to achieve.
Here are the many good and the few not so good aspects, relative to each of the attributes that I have listed above. In section 10 below I have provided links to a number of screen clips that might be of interest to you when you are reading the article.
P2 puts no constraints on where and how you put pictures and movie type files into folders and sub folders. There is no P2 folder as such; P2 simply watches folders that you tell it to "watch" or "scan" and it then displays the images that are located in those folders and allows you to operate on those images. You can do your folder and file management outside P2 if you want to, or you can use P2 functionality to do just about all the management. Changes such as additions, deletions, moves and renamings of folders and pictures made outside P2 (e.g. within Windows Explorer) are recognized by P2 in most circumstances. Therefore, in most cases you do not need to reorganize anything within P2 when you make such changes.
For the folders to be watched, P2 can be configured to display any or all of the following types of files: JPEG, JPG, TIF, TIFF, BMP, GIF, PSD, PNG, RAW and similar formats, movie formats (AVI, MPG, ASF, WMV, MOV). Movie files are played within P2 and you do not need to exit to any other player.
P2 has an unusual way of displaying folders, because the folder tree is not shown on the main viewing screen, just the folders themselves. Each folder is shown irrespective of its nesting within other folders. Initially I found this disconcerting. However I have become used to this now. Because the folders can be displayed sorted by Name or Creation date, and because words in folders' names are used in a search operation, it’s extremely easy to find the folder of interest. A right-click on any folder and selection of the "Locate on disk" option will show the folder's location in Windows Explorer.
Functionality exists for hiding (and unhiding) pictures and folders, renaming and deleting folders (careful!), and for renaming, deleting, moving and copying (via “export”) of files.
Pictures in each folder are shown as thumbnails of user-controlled size, with either captions or file names (but not both) underneath the thumbnail.
The order in which pictures are displayed within each folder can be changed by a drag and drop method.
The scrolling icons and the way they operate is a bit idiosyncratic and for me, not all that easy to control.
With a few exceptions, file and folder management functionality is very good. I can see some folk disliking P2’s style, but I think that with a little use, most people would feel that it's fine. I am quite used to it now, and can get around it quickly and effectively without stress.
Quick and effective simple editing of pictures can be achieved in P2. Itgroups editing functionality under “basic fixes”, “tuning” and “effects”. Of the functionality that is available, I found these to be effective in achieving quick fixes to badly taken pictures:
In fact, I found that for most straightforward adjustments that I wanted to make, I could achieve as good a result or better in P2 than I could achieve in industrial strength picture editors, and much quicker. P2 does not have functionality for working with layers, modifying histograms, de-noising, modifying specific areas within a picture, fixing blemishes, deleting spots and cracks, fudging pictures, and fiddling with separate colour channels. So for that type of heavy editing, P2 is not the application of choice, and does not pretend to be. So the type of user that P2 will appeal to is not a person who is into heavy tweaking of pictures but rather a person who wants to make quick fixes and then to move on to the next subject of interest.
P2 maintains a full history of the editing of each picture. This means that you can come back later and undo one or more or all changes that you made, and make additional changes. Fixes made in P2 persist across sessions. However, an interesting (and initially hard to grasp) feature is that editing in P2 leaves the original picture totally unchanged. So if the file that for the image that is visible in P2 is viewed in another editor, the changes made in P2 are not incorporated. I have been trying to find out how P2 does this and have a partial answer, which is that the editing data are kept in “picasa2.ini” files in each folder and elsewhere (but where that “elsewhere” is, is a mystery). So if you were to uninstall P2 and delete all the Picasa2.ini files and all the other folders that are used by P2, you would lose all the editing that had been undertaken in P2.
However, a picture which has been “edited” in P2 can be “exported” (i.e. saved) as a new picture, in which all the P2 editing is applied. Pictures saved to the CD in the slide show are new versions of the original pictures with the editing applied and if you specify, with downsized resolution.
What’s the advantage of this approach? One is that after doing quick fixes in P2, you still have the original image that has not been degraded at all by applying the P2 edits. So if you wanted to fiddle with the original file later in some industrial strength picture editor it’s still there, with all its original detail – zero information will have been lost through your P2 quick fixes.
To find pictures using P2 is a dead easy and an extraordinarily fast operation. This is of great merit to someone who has a large number of pictures, a poor memory and an aversion to writing things down or maintaining things in a catalog (like me).
When you are in the P2 main display screen (with the folder pane on the left, and thumbnails shown in panels on the right) there is a search box in the top right of the screen. In this box you can type one or more complete or partial "words" (which can be numbers) and P2 will find and display only the pictures that contain ALL those terms. By "contain" I mean that the complete or partial term (or terms) are in either the name of the folder in which the picture's file is located, or in the picture's file name, or included as a keyword or caption in the picture. Keywords and captions are explained below. However, insertion of a keyword or caption as an IPTC field in a picture, enhances greatly your ability to find a picture or set of pictures located somewhere on your hard drive.
One unintended consequence of using P2 has been a simplification of my picture filing strategy. In the past I used to create generic nested folders such as: \Family\Brendan & Kate\Cian\ and \Family\Brendan & Kate\Rachel\. Then I put pictures into those folders as I created them. A consequence of that was that each folder would have pictures created at different times. This led me to spending a lot of time changing camera-assigned file names like “DSC01134.JPG” to “Cian Xmas party 2004.JPG”. Now when I download a batch of pictures from my camera to the PC (using the import function in P2), I simply create a new folder with the year first, plus a few words of description like: “2004 xmas party home”. Inserting the folder within a nested tree is just wasted effort.
I then use P2 to put keywords into the pictures in the folder. A lot of that can be done quickly in batch mode, so for example, all pictures in a folder get the keywords “2004”, “xmas”, “weetangera” and “party”. Then I would add the keyword “cian” to all pictures with Cian in them, and the keyword “brendan” to all pictures with Brendan in them, and so on. I leave the name of picture in the camera’s “DSC01134.JPG” type format, because I can find pictures easily by keyword, so why bother spending time renaming the file? Later if I want pictures of Cian at ANY xmas at my home, I do a search in P2 by typing the words “cian” and “xmas” and “weetangera” into the search panel. Works like a treat and is lightning fast.
In fact, the search engine looks for the search terms in the folder names, file names, keywords and captions. So if you don't insert keywords or captions, but do use verbose folder names (e.g. “2004 xmas party home”) a search can still be very productive.
Even more easy: a search word starts being used effectively by the P2 search engine after there are 3 or more letters of the word typed in. So you can be lazy. For example, in most cases typing in the words "cai xma wee" would turn up the same set of pictures as would the words “cian xmas weetangera”. Searches will also include pictures in folders or files with names that contain the search terms, but the names do not have to match precisely the search terms. For instance, if you search using the term "200" it will show all pictures in folders such as "Home at 2003 Wilson Promenade", files such as "DSC_2004.JPG", pictures with a keyword like "2005", and pictures with a caption like "Windows 2000 screen".
In P2 one or more IPTC-compliant Keywords can be added to individual pictures or to a batch of pictures within a folder. Multiple keywords can be added to any picture or to a batch of pictures.
The P2 keywords are IPTC-compliant, because you can see, edit, delete and add to the keywords in Irfanview and Adobe Photoshop (which also have IPTC viewing and editing functionality). All three applications will each see each other’s keywords (and Captions – see below).
Having keywords in a picture enhances your ability to find pictures that you want quickly and easily. While a search in P2 will take into account folder names and file names, because it also takes into account keywords (and captions), use of keywords will enable you to find very specific subsets of your pictures.
Keywords must be single words (of 3 or more letters), not case sensitive, and each keyword can be up to 64 characters.
In the first version of P2, there was a bug in the keyword deletion functionality. That bug has been fixed in version 2.1.
In P2, IPTC-compliant Captions can be inserted into a single picture (but not to a batch of pictures). Captions can then be displayed under the thumbnail of the picture, and they will be included under the picture when displayed in a slideshow written to a CD.
However, the editing of what has been typed in as a caption (or entered in a batch captioning job) is quite inadequate. To change words you have entered or to correct a spelling mistake, you have to backspace to erase prior text, then retype from the point that you backspaced to. That's very primitive and clumsy. In the end I got into Irfanview to do caption editing – much easier. Photoshop also does caption editing better than P2.
P2 will not add the same caption to a batch of pictures. So I use Irfanview to do that.
I wanted to create a gift CD containing pictures to be mailed to my friends and for the CD to have these attributes:
These are the steps that you would follow to achieve that:
1. Select a folder containing pictures to be used.
2. If you don't want to include all of the pictures in the folder, "hide" the ones that you don't want to be included: select the picture or pictures to hide, right click one of them, click Hide. (NB: Set the top menu option of "View/Hidden Pictures" to on (ticked), because you can than still see the hidden pictures as greyed out thumbnails. If that option is not ticked, the pictures have no thumbnails visible at all and you may forget that some pictures are hidden, and wonder why they don't show as thumbnails later on!)
3. Arrange the non-hidden pictures within the folder in the order that you want in the slideshow. Do that by dragging the thumbnails around.
4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 for each folder of interest.
5. Click on any one of the folders of interest and then hit the "Gift CD" button towards the top of the Picasa main screen.
6. In the next panel displayed towards the bottom of the Picasa screen, click the "Add More" button in panel 1. Then select all the folders of interest
7. In panel 1:
- Make sure that the "Include Slideshow" button is ticked.
- Select a Picture Size - specify one of these sizes: “original size”, 640x480, 800x600 or 1600x1200.
8. In panel 2, make sure that "Include Picasa" is ticked.
9. Hit the "Burn Disk" button. You can burn to an write-once CD or to a rewritable CD. If there is stuff on the rewritable CD, Picasa will ask you if you want to erase it.
The processes after you hit the “Burn CD” button are few and trivial. Creation of an autoexecuting slideshow on CD is all done automatically and quickly. The burning is done by Picasa, not through use of some other application.
If you want to include pictures from different folders in just a single set of "slides" on the CD (i.e. not having separate folders shown on the splash screen when the CD is run), you would need to do a bit of fiddling first. “Hold” each of the pictures that you want on the CD irrespective of their location within folders. Hit the “Export” button to copy all the “held” pictures to a temporary new folder. Then drag the pictures in the temporary folder around into the desired order and then create the CD from this single folder. Finally, clean up by deleting the temporary folder and all the copies of the pictures in it. This works OK but is not a simple solution.
Once the CD is created, it will boot as an autoexecuting CD. The pictures are shown with a stop/pause button on each screen. The user has an option for continuous play and is able to control the time each picture is displayed.
One irritating problem is that above each picture the name of the file is shown (white on the dark grey border). I have not been able to find an option for NOT including the file name during creation of the CD. For that reason, when I import a batch of pictures into P2, I then change the file names to very short and innocuous ones. If the picture has an IPTC caption, it is also shown (below the picture; white on the dark grey border), so the viewer has a nice narrative there (e.g. “Brendan, Cian and Rachel, Xmas 2005"). If there is no caption, nothing is shown below the picture.
The type of transition effect (movement from one picture to the next one) is good. There is no facility for selecting other transition effects but that does not worry me because the result is nice and smooth. There seems to be no facility for including background music on the CD, but who needs that anyway?
The CD created contains all the required executables, so the recipient does not need to have any picture viewer on their PC. In addition, all the pictures are sent to the CD as image files which are visible on the CD using any browser. These files are created on the fly and have all the edits and resizing applied, so they are “normal” image files. They could be loaded into any viewer or copied to hard drive, if the viewer wished to so do.
There is a lot of other functionality in P2 that I have not mentioned above. The more interesting ones are these:
These links will take you to a number of screen shots which I have created to give you an idea about how Picasa looks. The pictures are low resolution to cater for readers that have limited bandwidth.
Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any comprehensive or organized help system for P2. This Google site has a list of frequently asked questions and links that will be of some use.
In addition, in Appendix 1, I have listed a number of usage tips for P2 users; some of the content will overlap with stuff on the Google site.
I have been using Picasa2 for more than six months. It is an excellent application that can be used very effectively to organize and manage digital image files, to find image files very easily, and to make easy and quick fixes to pictures. It has considerable additional functionality that may appeal to other users. It is well worth trying.
Mike Boesen
In using P2, you may find some of the following suggestions and ideas useful.