New Computing: Picasa’s Flaws

6 Dec

The new computing is about what users can do. Successful technologies are those that are in harmony with user’s needs. They must support relationships and activities that enrich the users’ experiences… The challenge for new computing developers is to understand what you, the user, want and to help you get it… ??Ben Schneiderman — Leonardo’s Laptop ??

First of all: forget about “Web 2.0,” that is not new computing. In fact, it’s really very much “old computing:” it’s about what computers can do. Web 2.0 is all about showing off all the neat little things developers can make your web browser do, and only peripherally about what you can do, and what you want. It’s marketing speak for “gee golly, we didn’t have this last year…” Of course, sometimes these intersect, and “what computers can do” turns out to be something that you want to do —that’s the foundation for the (old) computing revolution, in fact. But we’re so done with that… we want a renaissance, not a revolution.

Two of the darlings of “Web 2.0” are Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!) and Google, and I don’t understand how they could have so drastically missed what customers want
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What are Flickr and Picasa?

Flickr is a photo-sharing website which allows you to upload your photos and share them with contacts, friends, family, or the general public, and of course you all know what Google is. What you may not know is that Google purchased a company called Picassa a while back, and has not only decided to give away their namesake photo album software, but to continue development of it. Picassa, of course, offers all of the usual simple tools for organizing, sorting, and fine-tuning your photos. While you can’t really create complicated composite photos or anything like that in Picassa, you can easily adjust color balance, dark or crooked photos, red eye, etc.

In my opinion, the best part of Picassa, is the “labels.” On top of the usual feature of renaming, organizing in folders, and applying captions to photos, Picassa has the concept of labels (which are exactly the same as Flickr’s “sets”). What’s cool about this is that it allows me to take a photo of, say, my wife, her mother, and my two daughters, and label it as “Wendy” and as “Mikayla” and as “Katrina” and as “Weltons” (my in-law’s family name). Now I can find that photo by browsing the photos I took in December of this year, or I can find it by browsing any of the labels. It’s as though I had multiple copies of the image in several folders, but without actually making copies, saving me the space, and making sure that any retouching is applied to all the “copies” of the photo (Picassa always saves an untouched copy of the original photo, which is something so obvious that most similar programs forget about it).

Of course, by now you’re probably wondering why I’ve titled this post “Flaws” and posted it in my “rants” category… everything I’ve said so far is nothing but praise.

What’s wrong with Picasa?

The problem with Picasa is that it fails to understand the real world. I don’t take photographs so I can save them on my hard drive and look at them once in a while. I take them so I can share them with the world. All you have to do is look at the front page of the Picasa web site to see that they don’t understand that.

Picasa has a page on their website where they enumerate the features of the software: Organize| Edit| Share| Print| Backup| Create. But on the front page, they have a screenshot there where they call out the major features of the software … in fact, they basically list each of those features except sharing. Now, to be fair, Picasa does have a couple of ways to share your photos, but they make it much much harder than it needs to be.

Export to a folder. Basically, dumps the photos you’ve selected to a folder on your hard drive. There is also an option for creating Cd’s which I suppose you could then ship to people. For a while, exporting was how I managed sharing. I would take a bunch of photos with my camera, import them to Picasa from my SD card, select the best ones in Picasa and copy them to another folder, and then upload those to my Gallery or Flickr.
Send by email. This is the only option I’m actually using regularly … but my parents and brother (who only have dial-up access to the internet) have mentioned recently that when I do this, it takes them an extra hour to check their email. So I actually email photos to Flickr using the upload-by-email option, and then rely on my family checking the Flickr RSS feed.

Flickr, on the other hand, really gets the concept of sharing. They let me publish my photos in sets (the way I view them in Picasa), and they publish them in multiple image sizes so that my bandwidth-deprived friends and family can browse the smaller images before choosing to download the large sizes of the images they’re particularly interested in.

There are a few other options, in Picasa, but they are really non-starters for various reasons:

Post to your blog. Using Blogger. Yes, only using Blogger. So this isn’t really an option at all, because I don’t want to use Blogger. In fact, I don’t even want to see this option, because I don’t even have a Blogger blog. Remember what new computing is about?
Send as an instant message. Using Hello. Yes, only using Hello. So this isn’t really an option at all, because I don’t want to use Hello. In fact, I don’t even want to see this option, because I don’t even have Hello installed. Remember what new computing is about?
Make a slide show. And then you can, uhm… burn it to a CD and ship it to your friends.
Order prints (from one of Picasa’s financial partners). Note that this isn’t really sharing (and they don’t make the mistake of thinking it is) unless I am willing to pay to send a print to each of my friends… I noticed last week that both Snapfish and Shutterfly are on the printing list now, and I’ve been meaning to test if Picassa uploads the captions when you order prints through Shutterfly (because Shutterfly will print the captions on the back of the photos, which is very cool).

So can they work together?

In fact, Flickr and Picasa make an excellent team. And in the new computing world (Web 2.0 isn’t helping me) I would be able to export my images to Flickr directly from Picasa. Of course, in the old computing world, that’s not possible, because Flickr is owned by Yahoo, and Picasa by Google. I don’t have to explain that these two companies applications don’t inter-operate, it’s implied. Web 2.0 proponents say that as soon as all the web pages in the world have nice web service programming interfaces (APIs), everything will be better. Well, Flickr has an awesome web service API, but I still can’t use it. Because my photos are on my computer, and using the Flickr API requires software on my computer that interfaces with it.

Such software does exist. In fact, Flickr publishes several minimalistic uploading tools, and there’s even a plugin for the Mac OS X iPhoto software… But none of that is what I want to do: I want to use the best software that’s available for managing my photos locally. I don’t want to share all of my photos (never mind waiting for them to all upload, I’m certainly not going to waste everyone else’s bandwidth with all 25 photos I took of that one cute pose my daughter made. But I’m not going to throw them all out, either. I want to assign labels and captions to all of them, even if they’re just going to stay on my computer. When friends come over, I might show them some of the photos that aren’t really worth uploading …

Can we fix it?

What I want, need, and what I demand, is the best software product for managing my photos locally (and creating backup archives in case my computer dies), and the best web service for sharing my photos — and a pipe between them that doesn’t require me to manually create multiple photo sizes, re-enter my captions, re-label my sets, or upload a single photo at a time.

How could this be done? Very simply: I have a label in Picasa called “Flickr” (currently I label the photos I upload, so I don’t upload them again later). All it should take is a one-time configuration of that label, so that any time I add a photo to that label (or edit a photo within that label), I want it to automatically be uploaded to my Flickr website in the background, with all of the other labels as sets, and the caption and everything all integrated (as a side note, I’d kind-of like tags in Picasa, but that might just be me).

By Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett
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CommentsNew+Computing%3A+Picasa%27s+Flaws2005-12-06+21%3A43%3A33Joel+%27Jaykul%27+Bennett for "New Computing: Picasa’s Flaws"

eikonos December 7th, 2005 at 9:50 pm 1

I totally agree with your point about computing being for the users, not for ‘cool new tech’.

In regard to the Picassa/Flickr pipe, is it possible, and have you considered writing a plugin application to do that for you?
Jaykul December 8th, 2005 at 12:49 am 2

Actually, I’m kind-of looking into it. There’s no way to actually write a plugin for Picasa — they haven’t published an API — however, they do create a Picasa.ini file in each folder, and although I can’t tell right away where they store the “label“s, they have a “star” feature, and THAT is stored in the ini file (so I could use that as a way to detect which files should be uploaded). And the captions are actually put into the image as IPTC data.

Of course, the bummer is that all the “edits” you do to the image aren’t actually real unless you export (they don’t actually make a copy of the original as I said about, they simply don’t change it, all the edits are in memory only, as far as I can tell. That is, they don’t touch the original file, they simply make a note of what edits you’ve done, in the .ini file.
Jason December 21st, 2005 at 4:56 pm 3

Actually, uploading pictures from Picasa to Flickr is very simple and can already be done. At the bottom of your Flickr home page is a link called “Upload-by-email.” Click on that link and it’ll tell you the e-mail address you need to use to automagically upload your files from Picasa.
~Brian January 3rd, 2006 at 12:47 pm 4

Nice summation of all the compatibility problems. I currently have both Picasa and Flickr in heavy use, and do my best to make them work together. I hate that I have to tag/label everything twice … once in Picasa and once in Flickr. In fact, I no longer tag in Picasa … I search for the files in Flickr, find the dates/filenames, then use those to find it in Picasa. The Flickr tag is a great idea, though I’m sure there could be other ways to implement a ‘pipeline’.

Anyway, the labels are stored in a proprietary Picasa database, which I’ve not read of anyone being able to hack yet. Jason brings up a good point, except his method loses all the relevant info tied to the images.

Finally, I always think of Picasa labels matching to Flickr tags, not Flickr sets. The way you describe using them to label all of the people in a photo, etc., makes me think of them more as tags. I guess this point is still open to debate, though.

I hope someone creates this API-pipeline soon … I scan the web every few weeks looking for one, but nothing yet….
Jaykul January 4th, 2006 at 4:09 pm 5

Actually, Picassa’s albums (which they confusingly call labels in the UI) are the equivalent of Flickr’s “sets,” but they’re not stored in a proprietary format. They’re stored in plain old XML. They’re in the your user profile’s “Local Settings” folder, something like: C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2Albums\[Huge Random Seed]\

If you look there, you should see a bunch of .pal files, which are just plain XML files, containing a root picasa2album tag and a few property tags including the name of the album, and then a files collection enumerating all the images that belong to that album.

Anyway. Monitoring one of them for Flickr uploading is fairly simple, and checking them all to see what other sets each photo is in is fairly simple too … and the “captions” which Flickr calls “descriptions” are embedded in the actual image file in an IPTC annotation, and Flickr’s “star” is stored in the Picasa.ini file in the folder with the image.

The real problem is that Picasa doesn’t seem to actually store the edited images at all (since Picasa 2?), preferring to store the edits they do as instructions in the Picasa.ini file. So unless you want to upload the un-edited image, you’re actually forced to export them, unless you can find a way to turn this into actual instructions:
filters= crop=1,264,256,1372,995; enhance=1; autolight=1; finetune=1,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,fff3f4ef,0.000000;
Leonard February 1st, 2006 at 10:10 am 6

Well I use flickr and picasa extensively. I also take the route: No labels in picasa, edit, export, flickr.uploadr, tagging in flickr.
It’s not perfect, but since Picasa looses my labels all the time (My Networkdrive with the fotos is a bit flaky), I stopped doing more than editing, Folder-Organizing in picasa.

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New Computing: Picasa’s Flaws

What are Flickr and Picasa?

What’s wrong with Picasa?

So can they work together?

Can we fix it?