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I've been messing around with Picasa (the photo tool, not the similarly-named artist you dweebs!) lately, and I've two major impressions to share:

1. Damn near as good as Photoshop for the basic stuff (think Photo Elements), at a lower (uh, zero bucks) price.


2. Serious UI issues/concerns

I'm working with Picasa v2 on a P4 Windoze machine with a lot of RAM and disk space; your mileage may vary.

Re: Point #1: Yes, free product that does much of what the basic Photoshop commands do: Crop, filter, grayscale and so on. Pretty impressive, actually. I had downloaded Picasa v1x shortly after Google acquired Picasa and was not impressed; this has now turned around. Very mature app.

Re: Point #2: There are UI issues. Now, I'm fairly savvy with computers and graphics programs, but it was HELL to figger out how to copy (not move - copy) a picture from one area to another. Part of this issue is the new search/storage motif, as exemplified by Gmail and the upcoming MS Longhorn/Vista, where files can live anywhere, and are tied together by aliases and so on.

Fine. But in this case, I want a folder (for example) for pictures I shot in August. The raw images. I'll examine same, and COPY (not MOVE) the same to a repository that is "stuff I've uploaded" - so I can process that copied image to the specs of (again, for example) my blog without touching the original. Hey, I may need that 4M original image for some other reason...

Picasa makes this difficult. The regular "drag and drop" (with shift or control key so the + sign appears) or export feature pretty much just MOVES the file, which is not my desired result.

I think I've "cracked the code," but why should I have to?

Still, Picasa is looking like a winner for basic importing and photo browsing; my personal jury is still out on the Photoshop-ish qualities it does/doesn't have - I just haven't worked with it that much.

Further bulletins as events warrent...