Google Picasa.

I decided to start using Picasa. The implementation of their name tag feature got me interested, and next thing you know, I have almost 25,000 photos and videos being indexed in Picasa 3.

I went ahead and started syncing some photos with Picasa Web Albums. I burned up the FREE 1GB that Google gives you free pretty quickly, so I went ahead and dropped $50.00 to upgrade to 200GB of storage. I’m supposed to be getting a free 4 GB wifi Eye-Fi SD card in the mail from the signup too.

There are several things I really like about Picasa. I’ve used Flickr and SmugMug pretty extensively in the past. Picasa is the only photo sharing utility that combines a local photo organizer (Picasa 3) with a online web album (Picasa Web Albums). I really like being able to organize locally with Picasa and sync with the web albums to share and backup my photos.

The facial recognition / name tagging is a fantastic feature. It becomes addictive going through photos and labeling people.

I love the tie to GMAIL and the GMAIL contacts that syncs your face tags with your GMAIL contacts.

The inclusion of video in Picasa is great, especially since I picked up the new Kodak Zi8. I love that Picasa allows videos up to 1GB.

Here’s a couple of things that Google Picasa is definitely missing, and I hope to see them add soon:
I want to be able to search ALL of my photos by the meta information. Both Flickr and Smug Mug make it easy to find EVERY picture taken on a specific date regardless of what albums the photos are broken into.

I only have a small portion of my photo uploaded to Picasa Web Albums so far, and the number of albums I’m creating is growing at an alarming rate. I can only imagine the mess I’ll have in 10 years. Picasa needs to allow the ability to nest albums. I would love to create an album labeled 2009, and then nest albums under it for any special occasions. Again, this is a feature I was used to in SmugMug.

I want better photo sharing tools. I like the fact that Picasa web albums uses the gmail contacts and groups to manage sharing, but i would like to select multiple albums at a time to set the sharing on. It takes an inordinate amount of time to set sharing on albums one at a time. Also, I would like to be able to set sharing without sending an email to the person I am sharing with. Emailing everytime a make a sharing change seems very spammy.

I want to be able to use Picasa on my own domain name, the same way I use Google Apps. Let me direct my friends and family to a subdomain like photos.techytechygeekygeeky.com.

All in all, I am really enjoying Picasa. I am waiting for Google’s development to catch up with my desires. I’m sure I will find other ‘missing’ features as I dig in deeper, but overall it is a very nice way to sort and share photos and videos.