RECOMMENDED

VERDICT: Modern photo management software that’s a pleasure to use and which offers some surprising power –especially considering that it’s free.

Since 2004, when Google bought up Picasa and began giving it away for free, the software has been developing quite a name for itself along with a growing userbase.

It’s not just the price (or lack of it) that makes Picasa attractive. From the moment that you load Picasa, with its subtly animated splash screen, it stands out as modern, polished and responsive – a stark contrast to many of its increasingly dated rivals.
The overall experience is good, but just what control does the software offer? In terms of image management, Picasa takes a surprisingly old-fashioned approach based on physical folder structure. Admittedly it’s sometimes useful to think of images in terms of where they are stored but, for most users, folders tend to be fairly arbitrary groupings based purely on when you get around to downloading images from your camera - especially as Picasa’s basic Downloader doesn’t offer the ability to automatically divide images into groups based on the time between shots. However as Picasa defaults to sorting all folders by creation date rather than name and shows them following on from each other in the main thumbnail view this doesn’t prove a serious hurdle.
A more serious downside appears when you try to narrow down the view to find particular photos. Picasa’s name-based search is excellent but, as photo and folder filenames are rarely meaningful, it’s more important to be able to narrow your search based on when the photos were taken and this proves disappointing. In particular Picasa’s Timeline command again concentrates on folders rather than photos and presents these on a scrollable pseudo-3D curve over randomly chosen background images – flashy but virtually useless. Far more impressive and considerably more use is version 2.5’s new ability to tag and find your images based on location using Google Earth no less.
It’s not all about show - Picasa can also do the basics better than anybody. To manually take control of your collection for example you can temporarily group and hold images simply by dragging them to the photo tray at the bottom of the screen. From here you can permanently store the groups as albums (previously called labels) that can then be treated just like physical folders. It’s not as powerful as Elements’ full-blown hierachical tagging but it’s intuitive and very effective.

Picasa’s editing power is limited - but simple and non-destructive

The emphasis is also on simplicity when it comes to editing. Double-clicking opens the image into an editing workspace with a tabbed control panel to the left. The first tab offers Basic Fixes with one-off commands for removing colour casts and optimising exposure and tools for straightening, cropping and removing red eye. The second Tuning tab offers interactive control over fill light, highlights, shadows and temperature and the third tab offers 12 effects ranging from basic sharpening to applying a soft focus.
With no selection capabilities, retouching tools, layer-based compositing, text handling and so on Picasa’s editing capabilities are strictly limited – but for simple image enhancement it’s surprising how often they prove sufficient. And Picasa has one powerful editing trick up its sleeve as all its enhancements are applied non-destructively so that your original image is left untouched. The downside is that your changes are only apparent within Picasa itself. However, since version 2, you can now choose to save all changes directly to their files - in which case Picasa automatically stores a copy of the original image in a hidden directory.
When it comes to photo sharing, print-based control is limited to a few templates and collage layouts with no customisation control, but Picasa’s electronic sharing is excellent. You can burn images directly to CD or DVD either for backup or distribution (if the latter you can optionally include a self-running slideshow and a copy of Picasa). To directly send selected images you can choose to use your own email program or a Gmail or Picasa Mail account. Alternatively, by downloading Google’s Hello software, you can directly send your images to other Hello members using this cross between instant messaging and file sharing.
By far the most impressive option, and new to the latest 2.5 release, is the new Web Albums feature. This lets you select images and quickly post the original files to the web. Using your browser you can then organize your images, view them as slideshows, add captions, and send emails to friends and family to invite them to view the images. Alternatively, you can post your images as public galleries for anyone to see and post comments. It’s early days for the feature but it’s already impressive and Google should be particularly well positioned to build up Flickr-style search and community features. Hopefully it will also increase storage as currently this is limited to a maximum of 250MB (US users can upgrade to 6GB for $25 a year).
Picasa doesn’t offer the same depth of functionality as Photoshop Elements particularly when it comes to editing. However, for many users it gives them all the power they want, or have time for, in a simple and attractive environment - and with the knowledge that the program’s future is likely to be brighter still. Picasa 2.5 richly deserves the Labs Recommended award – and would win it even if it wasn’t free.

EASE OF USE 6/6
FEATURES 3/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 6/6
OVERALL 5/6