Picasa2 (“P2” hereinafter) is a
freeware
application from Google. It can be used
to “organise” photos that are on your hard drive/s.
It has a lot of functionality which is
presented in summary in this web page: http://www.picasa.com/features/index.php The build number that I have installed is
18.84 You can download Picasa2 from
here: http://www.picasa.com/download/index.php
Overall, I find P2 useful for management of
my digital images and have been using it a lot recently in preparing
some CDs
containing a selection of digital photos in JPG format (“pics”
hereinafter)
which I want to send to some friends overseas.
The reason I want a gift CD is that I don't want to assume that
the people
whom I want to see the pics can download them from a Web site - their
internet plan
may not have a sufficient bandwidth and/or download quota, but they can
play a
CD on their PC at no cost to them. (However,
note that P2 also has functionality for posting pics to a Google-hosted
site; I
have not used that feature.)
The pic management application that I wanted for file management and preparation of the pics needed to have these features:
(a) Fast and easy assembly of the pics in a “slide show” written to an autoexecuting.
(b) Easy resizing of the pics to a small format so it would show on just about any monitor.
(c) Ability to create and save captions that would give a brief narrative for each pic.
(d) “Captions” to be permanently encapsulated within the original source pic (the JPG file on my hard drive) as an IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) field, rather than being data stored in the application’s database. As with EXIF data, this means that the captions are not application-dependent, and are able to be accessed in any photo management application that reads/writes and edits IPTC fields. Picasa is one such application, as is Irfanview and Adobe Photoshop V7. This gives an interesting account of the IPTC standard, which seems to be a developing one: http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/iptc_naa.html#standards
(e) Ability to create IPTC “Keywords” that will be encapsulated with the original source pic, and again not application-dependent, and able to be accessed in any photo management application that reads/writes and edits IPTC fields. Note that lots of photo management applications have functionality for assigning “tags” or suchlike to pics and these tags can be used by the specific application to search for pics that have the tags of interest. However, most of these applications set up the tags in a database that is specific to the application, so that a different application will probably be unable to access the tags. As with captions, I wanted portability across applications, with the keywords being imbedded in the pics, not in an application-specific database.
(f) Ability to easily find and select pics of interest – such as those to be put on a gift CD. I wanted this to be achieved by using keywords to find the target pics, irrespective of the folders they are in on my hard drive. The concept is that if I can insert IPTC keywords into the header of each pic, I can then search for pics that contain one or multiple keywords.
(g) Functionality to do quick and effective editing of my pics before writing to CD and as a permanent application-independent operation. The types of editing I wanted to do are basic things like cropping, rotating, straightening, fill lighting, highlighting, adjusting colour temperature and sharpening. I was not after industrial strength editing, because if I want to get really fancy and expend a lot of time, I could do that in a dedicated editing application like Photoshop.
(h) Functionality for managing a growing collection of pics on my hard drive.
I had a look at a number of applications, including P2, Irfanview, PhotoAlbum, Adobe applications, and others. I settled on P2. While it has some limitations and probably bugs, it works quite well, achieving virtually all of my desired objectives. Here are the good and not so good aspects, relative to each of the wish list items above. I have listed them in temporal order of the operations that I performed when creating a gift CD.
Managing a collection of pics (item (h) above):
P2 has an unusual way of displaying folders, because the folder tree is not shown, just the folders themselves. Each folder is shown irrespective of its nesting within other folders. Initially I found this disconcerting, having been weaned on Norton Commander and on Xtree Gold. However I have become used to this now. Because the folders can be displayed sorted by Name or Date of creation, it’s easy to find the folder of interest.
Functionality exists for hiding (and unhiding), renaming and deleting folders (careful!), and for renaming, deleting, moving and copying (via “export”) pics. There is also functionality for hiding pics, but I have been unable to work out how to unhide them.
Pics in each folder are shown as thumbnails (2 sizes available) with either captions or file names (but not both) under the thumbnail.
Scrolling is a bit idiosyncratic and for me, not all that easy to control.
A very good feature is the ability to determine which folders are to be “watched” by P2. This means that additions, deletions, moves and renamings of subfolders and pics are undertaken in the background by P2 and it automatically updates “watched” things when changes are made outside P2.
With a few exceptions, file and pic management functionality is good. I can see some folk disliking P2’s style, and others feeling that it’s fine. I’m quite used to it now and can get around it quickly and effectively without stress.
Quick and effective editing (item (g) above):
Quick and effective straightforward editing of pics can be achieved. P2 includes “basic fixes”, “tuning” “effects”, cropping and rotation. In fact, I found that for most straightforward adjustments that I wanted to make to pics to be included on a gift CD, I could achieve as good a result or better in P2 than I could achieve in industrial strength pic editors, and much quicker.
An interesting (and initially hard to fathom) feature is that such “editing” in P2 leaves the original pic unchanged, but the outcome of the editing persists across P2 sessions. P2 maintains a full history of the editing of a pic. So you can come back later and undo one or more or all changes that you made, and make additional changes. In all that the source JPG file staying unchanged. 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 your editing.
However, a pic which has been “edited” in P2 can be “exported” (i.e. saved) as a new pic, in which all the editing is applied. Pics saved to the CD in the slide show, are pics with the editing applied.
What’s the advantage of this approach? One is that after doing a lot of fiddling in P2, you still have the original JPG file that has not been degraded at all. So if you wanted to fiddle with the original file later in some industrial strength pic editor like Adobe Photoshop, it’s still there, with all its detail – zero information lost!
Keywords and finding pics (items (e) and (f) above):
In P2 one or more IPTC compliant Keywords can be added to individual pics or to a batch of pics within a folder. Yippee. Multiple keywords can be added to any pic or to a batch of pics. These keywords are IPTC compliant, because I 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). When you search by keyword in P2, you can nominate one or more keywords. If you specify more than one keyword, it generates a Boolean AND query (e.g. the selected Keywords of "grandchildren", "2004" and "canberra" would display only those pics with Keywords indicating that they are of grandchildren taken in 2004 in Canberra. Keywords must be single words and are not case sensitive and each keyword can be up to 64 characters.
One keyword glitch: P2 includes keyword deletion functionality. The keyword IS deleted by P2 (no longer visible in P2, Irfanview and Photoshop). However, in some cases, finding pics in P2 using a keyword sometimes (maybe always) includes in the generated collection of pics those from which the keyword had been deleted earlier. Also, I found that some keywords I had never entered turn up pics that do not contain any keyword whatsoever. I found that doing a test search for pics using the keyword “adobe” turned up a number of pics that simply did not have any keywords in them at all!. I’m still waiting on a response about this and the delete glitch from Google. Overall, when the keyword glitches are fixed, the keyword functionality should be very good, and is quite useable now as is, as long as you can live with the delete glitch.
Captions (items (c) and (d) above):
IPTC compliant Captions can be inserted into a single pic or batch of pics through P2. They can then be displayed under the thumbnail of the pic, and they will be included under the pic when displayed in the CD slideshow. Very nice outcome. However, the way you type in the caption is inadequate: just like entry of a DOS command, to edit words you have entered, you have to backspace to erase prior text, then retype the whole lot. In the end I got into Irfanview to do caption editing – much easier. Photoshop also does caption editing better than P2.
Resizing (item (b) above):
Resizing of pics during creation of a CD can be done very simply: specify one of these sizes: “original size”, 640x480, 800x600 or 1600x1200. Limited options, but I think that it’s adequate. The resizing is applied to all pics being written to CD. Of course the original JPG file is left untouched. This is a very easy operation.
Assembly of the slide show CD (item (a) above):
Before creating the CD, you need to select the folder/s of pics to be included and optionally to arrange the pics within the folder/s in the order that you want for the slideshow. Within a single folder the order of the pics displayed as thumbnails by P2 can be changed by dragging them around – very easy to do and I think that the displayed order within the folder/s persists across P2 sessions.
After setting the order of the pics within folder/s, you hit the “Gift CD” button. If you want to include pics from more than one folder, you can do that easily on the “Create a gift CD” screen that pops up, through the “Add more” button. If more than one folder has been selected, the CD created will display the first pic in each folder on an opening splash screen when the CD autoexecutes, and the viewer can than select from those images which folder is to be shown. This makes for a very neat and effective way of presenting the pics.
If not all pics in a folder are to be written to the CD, you can “hide” the ones to be excluded and when the CD is written the hidden pics are not included. . However, I have yet to discover a way to “unhide” the hidden pics after creating the CD, so until I can do that, I will not use that technique. Either I am incompetent or the makers of P2 have forgotten to implement an “unhide pictures” menu option. Can someone out there please tell me how to unhide pictures? (In contrast, I note that P2 has a hide folders option, and an unhide folder option that works OK, once you discover that the “Folders on disk” bar at the left of the screen will show names of hidden folders at the bottom of the display.) My inability to use the hide function to exclude some pics from a folder when creating a gift CD is a major irritation for me. To work around this I have had to “hold” the pictures that I want to include in a CD, then “Export” copies of them to a temporary folder, drag the pics in the temporary folder to set the desired order, create the CD from such temporary folder/s, then delete the temporary folder/s. That’s too complicated
If you want to include pics from different folders in just a single set of slides on the CD (i.e. not having separate folders shown on the splash screen), you would need to do a bit of fiddling first. “Hold” each of the pics that you want on the CD irrespective of their location within folders. Hit the “Export” button to copy all the “held” pics to a temporary new folder. Then drag the pics 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 pics in it. This works OK but is not a simple solution but why would you want to do that anyway?
Once you have finalised the selection of folder/s of pics to be included on the CD, 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. If the CD is rewritable it detects existing content, and you can stop or select the “erase first” option.
Once the CD is created, it will boot as an autoexecuting CD. The pics 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 pic is displayed. One irritating problem is that above each pic 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 name during creation of the CD. If the pic has an IPTC caption, it is shown below the pic (white on the dark grey border), so the viewer has a nice narrative there (e.g. “Brendan and kids, Xmas 2005. Note: hole in jumper.”). If there is no caption, nothing is shown below the pic. The type of transition effect is nice. There is no facility for changing the transition effect but that does not worry me as 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 pic viewer on their PC.
In addition, all the pics are sent to the CD as JPG files which
are
visible on the CD, and within their folders.
These JPG files are created on the fly and have all the edits
and
resizing applied, so they are “normal” JPG files. They
could be loaded into any viewer or
copied to hard drive, if the viewer wished to so do.
Conclusions:
P2 has more functionality that I have mentioned above. For example, it has some functionality for printing pics or printing a contact sheet of all pics in a folder. In addition, you can: create an email containing a pic or set of pics; send pics to Google’s Hello system; batch rename pic files; create a poster; etc.
One unintended consequence of using Picasa2 has been a simplification of my photo file storage 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 pics into those folders as I created them. A consequence of that was that each folder would have pics created at different times. This led me to spending a lot of time changing file names like “DSC01134.JPG” to “Cian Xmas party 2004.JPG”. Now when I download a batch of pics from my camera to the PC, 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 assign keywords to the pics in the folder. A lot of that can be done quickly in batch mode, so all pics get the keywords “2004”, “xmas”, “home” and “party”. Then I add the keyword “cian” to all pics with Cian in them, and the keyword “brendan” to all pics with Brendan in them, and so on. I leave the name of pic in the camera’s “DSC01134.JPG” type format, because I can find pics easily by keyword, so why bother spending time renaming the file?. Later on if I want pics of Cian at ANY xmas at home, I do a search in P2 using the keywords of “cian” and “xmas” and “home”. Works like a treat and is instantaneous.
Irrespective of whether or not I continue to use P2, the work I have done in setting up IPTC compliant keywords and captions will not be wasted. If someone brings out an all-singing all-dancing photo management application that’s significantly better than P2, free, and with functionality for IPTC Keywords and IPTC Captions, I would be able to change to it knowing that I would not need to convert any application-specific database to retain my keywords and captions.
In terms for value for money (freeware), P2 is very good. However the keyword deletion problem and being unable to unhide hidden pics were of major concern to me. Maybe the problems are just me being unable to use the software properly, but I think not. Once I have solutions for my problems, I think that P2 will meet my needs very well. Hopefully, Google will fix any bugs in the near future and bring out further enhancements in the light of feedback from users.
Mike B