OddThinking

Which requirements does Picasa Web meet?

Summary

This was a very difficult tool to evaluate, as I will explain.

For all practical purposes, choosing Picasa Web as your host means choosing to run Picasa on your computer. (It may be theoretically possible to write your own apps using the API, but I am not willing to go there.) Using Picasa means handing over your computer to Google, and hoping for the best.

It is easy to attack the Picasa tool as difficult to use (and sure enough me, I will indulge, below). However, I didn’t want to give up on it too quickly. Why? Because, just maybe, the problem is just that my mental model of my photos doesn’t match Picasa’s model of its data storage. Maybe, it will suddenly click for me, and everything will be clear. Maybe, if I just change my workflow over to match the Picasa workflow, it will be more productive than ever.

If this was a casual, occasional-use tool, I would dismiss it, but if it is a successful contender, I will be spending many hours with it; the cost of changing mental models is amortized over a longer period.

The model with Picasa seems to be that Picasa application owns all your photographs (nay, all your images and videos!) on your machine, and then syncs with Picasa Web.

In theory, this is good news; it means I continue to own all my data on my machine, even if Picasa Web starts charging exhorbitant rates for storage (oops! Too late!). However, I am not yet convinced that the meta-data is available to me. I don’t know where Picasa stores it, or what format it is in. So, I can’t be sure I can get it out later. Hopefully, this is mere ignorance.

The number of features in Picasa/Picasa Web is impressive, and some of have high “coolness” factors. Picasa Web will perform face-detection (and recognition?) to help tag your photos.

(Question: Does that face data get synced back to Picasa? How, in Picasa, can I tag a face? How in Picasa web can I tag a face in a photo where no faces have been detected? I couldn’t figure any of these out.)

Strangely, the people data is stored separately to other tags. Not sure why. The people data does have email address, nickname and full name which gives it marks for simple contact management. A URL would be good too.

There is a sliding pricing scheme. The initial price to suit my storage needs today is reasonably low, but it scales too high too quickly. I am planning on scaling up my usage significantly in 2009. (Camera with more mega-pixels plus a negative scanner = eating hundreds of gigabytes for breakfast.)

As for the actual user interface, I was only half-joking about the upper picasas (maybe “picasals” would have been funnier…) I never realised how much I scowled while using confusing software until I started used Picasa for half-an-hour and could actually feel it. At least part of it is that Picasa writes in dark grey on light grey, in a font-size that is much smaller than my preference on this old monitor. (Hey, I selected my system fonts for a reason. Please use them.)

Here is a random selection of issues I had with Picasa, just to give you a flavour.

The first question I was asked was (paraphrased) “Would you like me to waste my time searching 400 GB for the 5 photos you want to upload, or just waste my time searching 90 GB?” Where is the option for “Neither, get your damn paws off my machine!”?

So, it started searching through 100,000 files in the background. Or at least I think it did. The non-standard progress bar disappeared after a while. I had no idea whether it was finished our not (I doubt it! There was probably many hours of processing required.), and no idea how to find out.

It uses non-standard scrollbars. No, seriously!

I find the Folder manager, to tell it only to look in one subfolder, with about one CDs worth of photos. It responds by finding videos in my Videos folder. Huh?

Using the Folder manager is painful for bulk directories. Keyboard shortcuts, anyone? An X next to a top level directory means both “Don’t search this folder” and also “Don’t search this folder, but search some of the sub-folders”. So there only way of finding out what is searched seems to be open every single folder in the tree?!

My folders are currently structured like so: My Pictures\Photos\Backed Up\DVD#4\eventName\Good\processed. Picasa, by default, displays only the last part of the path name, so all my Picasa folders are called “Processed”. Useful! I tried to rename the folder in Picasa, which immediately tried to rename the folder on disk; the folder which is a cache of my back-up. Luckily, I had marked it read-only just minutes before.

The big X in the top right corner of the window means close the application, not merely close the sub-window. Jeez, Louise!

So, despite my efforts, I feel a strong distrust of Picasa, and the pricing is going to bite me. Shame, because the Picasa Web feature list is impressive.