One of my Twitter friends, Rachel Reuben, was recently asking about our experience with Picasa and I emailed her my pros and cons. I decided to post that information here, as it might be helpful to others. We had Extensis Portfolio right when I started working here and nobody particularly liked it. We tried several different types of software and ended up settling with Picasa.
Here’s how we use Picasa
We use it to manage our 200,000 + college photos. We have about 10 people using it – 6 in PR, 1 in sports, 1 in alumni and 1 in community relations. We only have it accessible to marketing people. We have both PC and Mac users. Picasa came out with a Mac version several months ago and until then, our Mac people were using Adobe Bridge.
The images are simply stored in any network folder or folders and then you tell Picasa to look for photos in a particular location.
Pros for Picasa
- It’s free!
- EASY to use, extremely user-friendly
- Tagging (Keywording) is really easy (way easier than most software)
- When you add a tag, it writes it to the metadata of the file – IPTC, instead of to an internal database
- Picasa recognizes and can keyword video too
- Search is FANTASTIC – really fast, finds based on file name, folder name or keywords. (Of course, this is a Google product after all.)
- Any number of people can use it. (It is not server-based, but everyone’s folder locations point to the same location on the server.)
- We use Picasa Web Albums to do online event photo galleries and it’s so easy. Takes 5 seconds to make an online gallery. Yea, it’s not on our site, but we don’t care. We just link to the Picasa gallery from our site.
- You can also create Albums inside of Picasa. I have several for pictures I like or use frequently. (However this is not shared between other users. To combat this issue, if we need to create a “lightbox” of photos for multiple people to see, I just keyword them all with something very specific. Like if we’re searching for photos for our viewbook update, I might keyword all of the possibilities with “vb09update” Then, any user can search that and see them. Then, you just have to keep track of these code words you have used.)
- Easy to email photos, resize, etc.
- You can install a Facebook and Flickr plug-in for it to send photos directly to either. Again, very easy.
Cons
- When there are new photos, they have to “import.” Picasa does have an internal database for the display of the photos. This really isn’t a problem until for some strange reason, all the sudden nothing is displaying in Picasa and it’s reindexing all of the photos. This has only happened to me one time, but it was a pain. It takes 24-36 hours to index all 200,000 of our photos. I suspect that this might be due to loss of network connectivity, because Picasa will not work properly on my laptop as connection is on and off. Also, this is not a problem for me, but apparently our Director of IT complains about it being a bandwidth hog because of this indexing on multiple computers.
- The non-shared album issue mentioned above.
- When keywording tifs, Picasa does not write the info to the metadata.
Overall, we love it! And, if we decide we don’t, we can easily switch.
What does everyone else use?
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I love Picasa as well. You should know though that Picasa doesn’t save over the original. Both File > Save and the Save to Disk button create a copy of your original photo (with edits applied) and move the actual original to a hidden originals sub-folder. View hidden files and folders and you’ll see. The revert function just ditches the new copy and moves the original back out from the originals folder.
The export, save a copy functions of course create the new file, leaving the original unmoved.
I found this: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=11021
Cheers,
Mark
I caught up with your post right after Rachel Reuben wrote about it. This was great timing for my non-profit organization because we are always trying to figure out how to best share photos without having to purchase pricey software (that won’t usually work on our antiquated computers). We are going to give Picasa a shot.
My only question involves the sharing of the photo folders. How do you control who has access to it? Is it a specially named folder that is only mapped on certain computers? I can think of a few ways to do this, but I’d love to know what worked for you.
Thanks for sharing, Whitney. I was just about to e-mail you for this kind of info as RC appears to be one of the few universities I’ve founding using Picasa extensively for “official” purposes … We’ve been using Smugmug for a few years and have a customized site established at http://photos.colstate.edu … The problem is that searchability leaves something to be desired … Our Web Team folks are convinced Picasa is the way to go, especially now with facial recognition … One thing I’m not clear on is how you have up so many photos and are apparently still using the free version? Is it because you handle Events photos differently w/Web Albums? Or that’s my perception from what you wrote above … Are you using some kind of companion software like SimpleViewer w/Picasa? Has there been any thought of letting students, alumni add photos? That’s been discussed here … and I’m not so sure. Thanks, Bill (Columbus State University, Columbus, Ga.)
Bill, I just sent you an email, but here’s the basics. As for uploading photos to Picasa Web Albums, yes, you have 1 GB of free space and then you can pay $5/yr for 20GB and so on. So far, we are only using 326MB of space. So, eventually we might need to upgrade, but it’s only $5.
Thanks for your article.
Just a question. Do I have to worry about possible data corruption when two users are simultaneously writing to the shared Picasa database?
@ Aldo,
No, you don’t. The database isn’t shared, but rather on each computer. It contains
* Location of the files
* Unsaved edits made to them
* Album organization
* Previews of the images
However, when you tag the photos, it saves that information to the photo directly, in the IPTC data…so that part is shared.
Hope that helps.
I’ve been pouring over your article as we research a better image management solution, and it’s been an enormous help. The one thing I can’t seem to figure out is how the tagging info will be shared. If we’re pulling the images off of our network and we each have Picasa on our harddrive, how do one person’s tags transfer to another machine without loading everything to Picasa Web Albums? I downloaded the Picasa software and we couldn’t really figure out how to share as you mention above. You have 6 people using it- is that because of Picasa or because there are 6 people with access to the image drive?
Leila,
The photos are saved on the network. The index of all the network images are local (but the same) for everyone. And, the keywords are saved to each picture on the network.
Here’s a good test for you. Open Picasa, have it point to a network location where you have photos. Keyword a few. Then open that same photo in other software, such as Adobe Bridge, and you will see those keywords.
I tested this before we ever started, so that I was sure if we ever wanted to stop using Picasa, all of our hard work would not be lost.
Hope that helps. If not, let me know.
That helps a lot, thank you! I also tried tagging images in the Picasa Web Album, but it looks like that doesn’t sync back to the software. Is that correct or am I doing something wrong? Thanks again!
Leila – You’re right. Albums does not sync back to Picasa that I’m aware of. However, tags will push from Picasa to Albums.
Hi Whitney. Many thanks for the write-up. I didn’t know that tags in Picasa modified the original files. What did you folks not like about Extensis Portfolio? And can you give me an idea of what it cost for you? I’m searching for a good digital management tool. And although I’d prefer one that doesn’t require a local client, Picasa is appealing on some levels, especiallly the facial recognition. Thanks much.
Michael,
We didn’t like Portfolio because it was slow and clunky, and expensive. I do not remember what the cost was, but remember thinking it was too much.
I am trying Picasa as a solution for transferring a non-profit agency’s image library which is presently only organized through Windows Explorer folder structures. They need it to be much more searchable – by keywords, tags, etc.
I’m wondering if any of you have come up with best practices for storing copyright data Picasa. This agency uses different photographers and I need to capture data related to copyright permissions in the metadata.
Thank you!
Susan,
What we do is keyword something like this into all of our photos:
photographer: Whitney Anderson
That way, later when we want to use a photograph in the magazine, for example, we know who to credit.
We include photographer so that we aren’t confused with just a name that might indicate who is in the photograph.
Hope that helps.
One more question – how do you share tags across multiple users? I’ve been playing around with this; we need for one user to be able to tag a photo and other users on the same network to be able to search on those tags. I’m referring to keyword tags, not the Name Tags feature.
I am interested to hear what solutions any of you have found success with, or ruled out. All the posts I’ve read sound like Picasa really won’t accomplish our need to share photos (with their edits and keyword tags) across multiple users, which is very disappointing. I’ve found a couple suggestions to try out (saving Picasa database to network instead of C: drive and rebuilding the database often). Neither of those sounds very reliable or desirable, but I will test out the network suggestion.
I can’t find any software that really meets our needs to share metadata across multiple users – without resorting to DAM software which is expensive and seems to have many dissatisfied users.I haven’t found a single DAM product that doesn’t have a lot of haters out there, so I’m reluctant to ask this non-profit to splurge $5,000+ on something like Extensis which has many dissatisfied customers.