The advantages of using Picasa

ilike Picasa, the photo organizing program. It's not perfect. It has some historical warts and bugs. But there's so much right with Picasa that I think the good stuff far outweighs the issues.Now, Picasa (the photo organizer on my PC) is a completely separate thing from the photo sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums, Flickr,SmugMug, and Zenfolio etc.But once I've bought into Picasa, it's a no-brainer to use Picasa WebAlbums... It's free for 1GB of space. And it's integrated with Picasa (the program on my PC). Uploading edited photos to the webalbums site through Picasa is exceedingly easy.

I like to share my photos with family and friends. I don't think I need a lot of major bells and whistles in the photo sharing area.Nested albums might be nice at the web albums site. But that's so low on my priority list that I don't really care if they nestthem. Full screen? Well, if you do the web albums "slideshow"button, you get full window views of the photos... good enough for my needs... again, in my book,a photo sharing site needs to be able tomake the photo available to the people I want to share them with. My recipients/viewers can always download the photos to their PC and useany program they like to view them...

The security down to the individual photo... My opinion is that itmore work than its worth - both for the Picasa guys to implement and for users (like me) to configure. To tell you the truth, I'mperfectly happy with the simple Public vs. Unlisted capability that wehave right now.It might be nice to have an Unlisted URL that contains the URLs to all the unlisted albums (that'd save people with private albums from having to send each individual URL - as long asthey were happy sharing access to all their unlisted albums...

I think the web albums site has gone too far in letting people do workin your browser at the web site - you can add captions and keywords upthere. And, as far as I know, there's no way to get that work backdown onto your PC where your photos nreally live. That is, you can do the captions and keywords in Picasa on your PC and *then* upload tothe web albums site. That's great.My work is on my PC where my photos live... and the web albums site reflects that information.

But if the web albums site (or any photo sharing site) lets me addmetadata (captions, keywords, other info about the photos), that extra info dang well better be able to be moved back down to my photos on myPC. Right now Picasa can't get that metadata from the web albums site back down to the PC. That's bad. That's one of those warts... theeasy enough workaround is to simply do your captioning and keywords onthe PC and ignore that stuff on the web albums site.

Basically, a photo sharing site contains just copiesof your photos. I firmly believe that your definitive collection ofphotos must remain on your PC. And that edits and organizationalmetadata like tags and captions and "mouse-over who's who" features need to be maintained on the PC. Anything else has you spending toomuch timeorganizing photos where you don't have the information
actually with your photos on your PC.