Google's Picasa (free) continues to impress with the smoothness with which it lets you import, organize, and perfect your digital photos. I've praised the app in the past for its leading integration with its online component, Picasa Web Albums in previous reviews, but since the advent of Google Plus, the clarity of this integration has become muddied somewhat, with a new emphasis on Google Plus, which unfortunately comes at the expense of sharing to places more people care about: Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. Despite that one self-inflicted injury, Picasa is still a great photo app (and basic video editor), and the new version adds a bunch of clever new effects, thanks to Google's purchase of (and shuttering of) the much-loved Picnik online photo editor.
As a standalone photo editing and organizing app, Picasa remains one of the best free options you can choose. Its face recognition, geo-tagging, effects, and text overlay tools are class-leading, as is the ease of using these them. Some have called into question Google's continuation of Picasa as a desktop app, though, so you may have to get it while you can. One piece of evidence for this is the new Creative Kit, an online photo editor that bears a family resemblance to Picnik. For now, though, let's tour what you get in this standout piece of software.
Signup and Setup
Google recently abandoned Picasa for Linux, with the last Linux version at 3 (and that's labeled "beta"), so none of the updates discussed here apply to that OS. The current version runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Mac OS X (Intel only). The small 14.5MB Windows installer downloaded in a jiffy, though after installation it takes up 63MB on your hard drive. Note that the installer tries to switch your browser search engine to Google if you're using Bing, Yahoo, or another default search.
When you first run the app, you'll get only one choice: whether to use Picasa as your default photo viewer. Then along the lower-right side of your screen, you'll notifications as all the photos in all the likely folders on your computer are sucked into Picasa's database. In earlier versions, the initial run also asked whether you wanted Picasa just to scan your My Picture, My Documents, and Desktop folders or you whole computer for any added photos, but now it makes that choice for you, picking the former. On Windows, you'll see your iCloud Photo Stream if you've got that set up on your iPhone or iPad, but Picasa doesn't support iCloud on the Mac.
Interface
Picasa 3.9's interface remains largely similar to its preceding versions. Folders on your computer are shown in a panel on the left, as are entries for Albums, People, Projects. The folders are organized by year and sorted in chronological order. Buttons at lower-right let you show People, Places, tags, or photo info in a right panel. At center bottom are the buttons that let you share to Google Plus, email, export, star, or quick rotate. A neat little touch is the animated star that flies up and spins when you start a photo. At lower-left is a tray that helpfully lets you pick photos to work on temporarily. A new side-by side comparison view helps in choosing the best of a pair of images or edited versus un-edited.
Once you click into a folder, you'll get the shuttle control on the right instead of the standard scrollbar you see when you're in an album. I previously thought this shuttle was a nifty interface innovation, but now it just seems inconsistent within the program. Oddly, when working in the Recently Updated auto-Album, Picasa wouldn’t let me scroll to the bottom of the photo set, though I could see more thumbnails peeking up from below the window edge.
After I clicked into a photo, Picasa's editing tools appeared in a left panel, with a couple new additions. Now there are five tabs here, where formerly there were three. The new ones are for effects presumably brought over from Picnik. I still like the easy rotate and view zooming choices below the photo view, as well as the histogram. I could also show full EXIF info in the right panel. Nice clear buttons let you Undo any effects you've applied. And adding a caption (which will be transferred to the online gallery) was easy as pie from the space below the image.
Importing and Organizing
A prominent Import button gets you started, and Picasa helpfully adds a choice to the Autoplay dialog that pops up when you insert camera memory into your computer. Groups of shot thumbnails are grouped in the import dialog by time periods, similar to the Events in Apple iPhoto ($14.99, 4 stars), and you can see larger previews of the photos you're about to import on the right side of the window. To its credit, Picasa had no trouble importing camera raw files from my Canon DSLR—Windows Live Photo Gallery (Free, 4 stars) requires a codec installation for this, while iPhoto is equally adept out of the box. You can star or reject photos even before import, but you can't apply tags or preset edits to the group, as you can in many other photo apps. Windows Live Movie Maker lets you rate with one to five stars as opposed to Picasa's simple on or off star, but the single star will suffice for most users. You can also apply effects in batch, or even copy multiple adjustments from one image and apply them to a selected group.