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.