Well, some of you were skeptics that Picasa 2.5 had officially launched but Google has finally made the announcement themselves. Their list of changes hasn’t really been altered since the other day:
- Share photos online
- Nested folder view
- Save changes to disk
- Improved import
- Screensavers
- Geotagging
- Larger thumbnails
- New RAW features
- Improved caption editing
- Starred photos organize automatically into a special album
- “Just raw frames” option lets you export time-lapse sequences in the movie maker
- The bottom row of buttons can now be configured to suit your needs
My favorite feature in Picasa 2.5, besides for the obvious integration with Picasa Web Albums, is the nested folder view. I have my photos meticulously organized on my computer with a lot of folders nested within each other. The biggest disappoint, however, is that they have not updated Piscasa Web Albums to use a folder structure. For that reason it is really not possible for me to upload my photos online.
This seems to be a pretty solid release and with the growing popularity of Picasa I’m sure Google will continue to update it. I wonder how long it will be before Google teams up with a manufacturer to bundle this software with a new purchase of a camera?
Picasa is useful software – but I still wish they would allow picture imports to be file-named (I use YYYY_MMDD (#).JPG) and put in existing folders, because I organise using labels and my directory structure is simply a new folder for each year.
Yeah, I would also like a file-renaming feature native to Picasa, but there are plenty of free programs that can do the same thing.
I like the new import features. The original import tool was so basic; it wasn’t even possible to import twice into the same folder. Now you can select previously created folders to import to, and you have the option to only import selected pictures, and to only delete the imported pictures from the source. It seems like Google really listens to what their users want.
Best photo-software out there. Can only get better.