Picassa Web Albums Launched

Wednesday, Jun. 14 2006 | Author: jeremy

Google has added a Web Albums feature to its free photo editor, Picasa.

Picasa Web Albums is Picasaâs newest feature, designed to help users post and share their photos quickly and easily on the web.

The service is offered by invitation only on a first come, first serve basis for the time being. Web Albums includes 250 MB of photo storage and is upgradeable to 6 GB of storage for $25 a year. By comarison, Flickr - an obvious competitor to this service - offers 20MB on its free account and unlimited storage for $25 a year.

Being a Mac user, I have never had an occasion to use something like Picasa for photo organization, defaulting to iPhoto with a plugin for uploading to Flickr. Can anyone who has used Picasa speak to its pros and cons?

Category: Uncategorized

7 Responses for "Picassa Web Albums Launched"

Jason

June 14th, 2006 at 10:18 am
1

I’ve been using Picasa for over a year now I guess, maybe longer. I’ve been greatly pleased with it’s functionality and search features, as well as tagging, image adjustment/repair, slideshow creation and other great features. I do a lot of image editing and graphics manipulation, so I also have Fireworks MX 2004, IrfanView, and SnagIt on my system for various tasks. However, I always recommend Picasa to friends and family looking for a far greater way to manage their image and media files. I have not seen or have any experience with iPhoto
kent

June 14th, 2006 at 10:34 am
2

Picasa rocks. Non-destructive editing, tweaking, rotation etc. Great organisational tools. Simple enough that my wife and mother both use it…

I’ve seen many Mac people cry out for Picasa on OSX.
static

June 14th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
3

picasa is somethink like a clone of iPhoto for windozer, for me it’s the best imaging oragnization/viewing tool! i have to try it out :D
Tim

June 15th, 2006 at 7:29 am
4

I am a recent mac convert, and the one thing I miss like hell is picasa. iPhoto is quite lame by comparison, although adobe lightroom might be a possible competitor (if it’s not too expensive…)
Chet

June 15th, 2006 at 8:57 am
5

Pros: Awesome. Fast, great editing controls, easy.

Cons: Limiting. No cards/book/calendar features like iPhoto. No drag-drop simplicity between apps: You have to use their export feature if you want to keep your edits when you use your photo, and from what I see, the export process dumps your EXIF data from the image. No 1-5 star rating, just “star” or “no star.”

Picasa is really a wonderful app for 80% of consumers out there, but unfortunately I find myself in the 20%. It’s just not quite powerful enough for me, so I’m going to check out Lightroom when it comes out, like Tim mentioned.
Craig

June 16th, 2006 at 3:11 am
6

Add me to the list of Mac users pining for Picasa. It kicks iPhoto’s bootie in every aspect except integration with other iLife apps. It’s fast, tools are great, uploads to virtually every photo site known to man, does backups (and keeps track of what you backed up), lets you create gift CDs and DVDs with collections of pictures… and much more. Anyone using any other photo manager needs to try Picasa TODAY. No kidding. I really hope they make it for Mac, but if not I’ll just run it in Parallels on my MacBook Pro. :)
Steven

August 1st, 2006 at 11:38 pm
7

I’ve just switched to Mac, and cannot even bring myself to work with iPhoto for more than a few minutes at a try. It’s just that depressing.