So, in case you haven't noticed, I've been messing around with the newer test version of Picasa. That's the new version that can upload to picasaweb, rather than the older version that was just a standalone tool.

So far, I'm pretty impressed. I haven't explored all of the app's functionality just yet, but it has done what I needed it to, and nice and quickly at that.

Given recent events, I'd been looking for an easy way to sifting through a few hundred photos, pick the ones I wanted, and then perform a few simple edits before uploading 'em as an album on the web so I could just pass out a single URL to friends and family instead of emailing stupid numbers of photos about the place. While I could do the same thing with photoshop and upload to any old photo hosting site, given the number of photos I was looking at, I wanted something simpler.

My requirements for the tool are pretty simple. The software must allow me to:

• Browse easily through large numbers of photos and easily select a subset for an album.
• Perform basic edits on all selected photos, such as managing colour balance, sharpening and cropping.
• If possible, perform the upload of all images from within the tool itself.

Additionally, the photo hosting service must preserve full-sized images that are uploaded - I don't like services that only store reduced-size versions of the photos I upload.

Picasa pretty much does all of this from one package. The control it gives over image editing is a far cry from Photoshop, but it seems good enough for my needs - I could definitely get better results with Photoshop, but I don't want to take hours to do each album.

When started, Picasa starts indexing what photos it can find in standard locations on your hard drive. It looks at your desktop, as well as My Documents for images, and remembers what it finds. The tool can be directed to index other directories from within its options. The nice part is that it understands many image formats, including the likes of Photoshop's .psd, and will generate thumbnails for those. It also indexes and generates thumbnails for movie files, too, which is a nice touch.

It then presents an index of directories (and later, "albums") containing images in a list on the left, and shows thumbnails of images in the main pane of the app. Scrolling through sets of images is pretty quick and easy, though the interface does not follow usual windows standards (the scrollbar is somewhat weird from a Windows point of view). Selecting images from there is accomplished by control-clicking in the same way you would multiple files in Windows.

Once a set of photos is selected, you can group them in an "album", in Pcasa-speak. The photos aren't moved or altered in any way - the app just remembers which photos were selected and remembers that they're grouped together. The nice part about this is that any photo can appear in multiple albums without having to have multiple copies of the photo floating about.

A title is given to the album, and a date, location and short description for the album can also be filled out. If the album is ever uploaded, this information is copied with it to the web.

There is also a whole bunch of management functionality I haven't played with yet. You can rate photos and sort by the highest-ranked onces. You can supposedly "Geotag" images with google earth, which presumably means you can identify where on Earth each photo was taken. The tool also includes integrated uploading to a bunch of printing services such as WalMart and Ritz camera, it can create collages of multiple photos and slideshow CDs, can be used to easily send small versions of photos through email, and can export photos to your Tivo (though Tivo's software needs to be installed).

So, managing photos with Picasa is pretty simple, but it also needs some editing functionality to make it useful. This it has, but the tools available are pretty rudimentary. The app has been created to be easy to use, rather than amazingly powerful, which is just fine for the way I want to use it.

Double-clicking on any thumbnail brings up a larger view of an image, and the editing tools are then displayed to the left. The available tools are grouped into several tabs, with "Basic Fixes", "Tuning" and "Effects" made available.

"Basic Fixes" is a good name for the first tab. This groups together the controls to do the most fundamental tweaks to a photo. There are buttons to crop, straighten, fix redeye, try auto contrast and so forth in there. Each button has a little icon that depicts the effect each control has on the image to make things easier to understand for the uninitiated.

The crop tool is pretty much what you'd expect. You drag the area you'd like to keep, and the rest is shown in a darker hue. However, the tool does give a couple of options to contrain the proportions of the cropped area, which is useful. There are settings for 6x4", 8x10" and so forth, plus a manual control if you want to fully control the aspect ratio of the crop yourself. A preview button is provided to show you what your crop will look like without the darkened area you're removing.

The "Tuning" tab is devoted to sliders for playing with highlights, shadows and fill lighting, and a control for colour temperature. There's nothing new or earth-shattering there - you play with each slider, and the image is adjusted to show you the results of the change. There is also an eyedropper for picking a neutral colour in the usual way, which is handy.

The "Effects" tabl has buttons for various other visual tweaks. There are two types of tools here. The first type is simple, one-shot tweaks that work once when you push the relevant button. These have a little blue "1" in the corner of their button. The second encompasses more complex tools that require an additional dialogue to get the job done.

Currently there isn't a huge range of effects tools available right now. The list currently consists of:

• Sharpen
• Sepia
• B&W
• Warmify
• Film Grain
• Tint
• Saturation
• Soft Focus
• Glow
• Filtered B&W
• Focal B&W
• Graduated Tint

The sharpening tool is a bit of a letdown as it's a one-shot control. You push it, and the image is sharpened a bit. Push it again, and it's sharpened some more. It's simple enough, but I think I would have preferred something with more control, to be honest.

I guess I'm surprised that there isn't an effect to make turning an image black and white except for a single colour (or small range of colours) real simple. You know what I'm talking about.

Other than that, I don't have much to say about the effects - it sharpen tool is weak, and that's about it.

Oh, it's probably worth noting that none of the edits actually touches any of your photos by default. This may sound weird, but it makes a huge amount of sense. The way Picasa works is to remember everything you've done to a photo in a file called "Picasa.ini" in the same folder as the photo. If you mess with any image, there will be an entry in that ini file that describes to Picasa what you did to the image. This means that you never have to worry about Picasa screwing up EXIF information or your JPEGs being reduced to quivering masses of compression artifacts due to multiple edits, and all changes made can be undone out at any time.

Of course, you can make the changes permanent, but I haven't tried that yet. Personally, I'd even like an option to remove that from the user interface entirely.

Anyway, since there's a 10,000 character limit per post, the rest of my blurb will have to follow in another post...

Moving on, uploading photos is a breeze. Once selected, a set of images can be uploaded to picasaweb with the big "Web Album" button at the bottom. The process of uploading is then handled by a couple of dialogue boxes - you get the chance to tweak the album's information (title, date, location, description - the same info you put in when you create an album locally), and you also get a chance to tell the tool how to upload.

The choices here are few. You get a sort of privacy control, and you get the chance to tell Picasa what sort of size you'd like the uploaded images to be.

The privacy control provides the ability to make the album completely public or make it a little more private. The former allows anyone that knows about your account to see the album. The latter provides a little obscurity - you have to give our the URL to the album, and nobody that knows about any given album should be able to easily infer the location of any of your other albums.

The size control tells PIcasa that the stored images should be sized down a bit, or that the full-size versions should be kept. This allows you to decide how to make use of the available space (250MB for the free account).

Once that's decided, you hit the go button and the upload process starts. A little dialogue is displayed to show progress. It's pretty simple stuff.

The last thing I want to talk about is how easy the tool is to use for emailing photos to people. OK, so the reason I picked up Picasa in the first place was to get away from mass emailings, but I did find that this made life infinitely simpler for my wife.

Do you know someone out there that, each time they send photos by email, sends the full-size 2000x1500 (or larger) image instead of resizing to something a little more sane that'll fit on your screen? I know I do, and I've installed a couple of firefox extensions in order to deal with the insanity.

My wife is quite aware that this is a Bad Thing, so she always likes to have smaller images to send. Personally, I find that 800 pixels in the longest dimension is a good size (i.e. 800x600, or 600x800 for verticals). In the past, I've tried to teach her how to do this with various tools, but I've always ended up having to do the resizing for her.

PIcasa does away with all of this. What it does is automatically resize all images you email based on what you set in the Email tab of the Tools...Options dialogue box. It just does it without asking questions...it's such a simple idea, and it's brilliant.

For example, I set Picasa on my wife's machine to resize everything down to 800 pixels. She then just picks the photo(s) she wants to send and pushes the email button. Picasa integrates with Gmail very nicely (it knows about your address book, etc.) and since she primarily uses her Gmail account, it's a no-brainer to just use that.

Disclaimer: I have tried nothing but using Gmail to do this. I guess I really should set it up to try using Thunderbird or another external mailer.

All in all, it's a pretty simple tool, which has its ups and downs. Personally, I like it a lot for what it is, i.e. a simple means to manage large number of images and create simple web albums.

Pros

it is mind-bogglingly easy to use. This is now the tool of choice for my wife to email photos, and I haven't been asked to intervene since I installed the thing, which is light years ahead of anything I've tried her out on in the past.

Its ease of use also translates directly to speed. After I decided on the photos I wanted, I was able to create each of the two web albums of our baby in well under 20 minutes, which works out to much less than a minute tweaking per photo. The workflow in Photoshop wouldn't let me move that quickly.

The tool is capable of displaying almost every image format you;re likely to encounter, and can also handle movies without breaking a sweat.

Finally, I love the fact that it doesn't actually edit the images itself, but rather remembers what has been changed and applies those changes when you view an image. This is a great idea - I was wary about letting it loose on my photo collection, but once I discovered this I felt much more at ease.

Cons

Sometimes the thing is just too simple for its own good. For example, I'd love the sharpening tool to be much more controllable, instead of the one-click job that is currently supplied.

I also don't appreciate the non-standard (from a Windows point of view) user interface. Google's idea of a scrollbar is different from Windows', and the result is a bit jarring, to be honest. It seems unnecessary that they wouldn't just do it the way Windows does.

Finally, I'd love it if, like Google calendar, I was able to share my Picasa account with my wife. If you're not familiar with Google calendar, it allows you to give permission to other Google users to add and modify stuff in your calendar. If I were able to share my web albums like this with her, she would be able to tweak photo captions and so forth to her heart's content. OK, so that's more a criticism of picasaweb rather than the tool - go figure.

Finally finally, it would be nice if Picasa could be used to upload to other image hosting services. Personally, I'm fine with picasaweb - it does pretty much everything I need it to. However, I could see others wanting to upload to Flickr or Photobucket or wherever.

Thanks for your impressions. There are very few reasons I'd prefer a PC over my beloved Mac but Picasa's one of them. iPhoto is great but unwieldly, and has an implausible filing system...

I've no doubt that Google will eventually release Picasa for the Mac. After all, they lagged a bit with Google earth for the Mac, but they caught up eventually.

The only reason the Linux version arrived first is because it isn't actually a Linux app - it's just the Windows version run under WINE, a Windows compatability layer for Linux.

Well, for what it's worth, I used Picasa's "Order Prints" (or whatever it's called) feature for the first time last night. All in all, it seemed to work painlessly enough when I chose to print at ritz camera, though Picasa doesn't handle the complete process of ordering - it's more just an easy upload tool.

After selecting a bunch of prints (in this case, a few drafts of the birth announcement I've been photoshopping together), pushing the "Order Prints" button displays a page where you select which photo service you'd like to use in a given country.

In the U.S., the available services are a mix of those with a brick & mortar presence where you can pick up from (Walmart, Ritz, Walgreens, etc.) and those that are online-only who send your photos to you in the post (Snapfish, Shutterfly, etc.).

Depending on the service's policies, picking that service will either directly upload your photos (with a little dialogue showing upload progress) or a login dialogue will be displayed. You can either sign in or create an account from there, and the upload will proceed after that.

Once the upload is complete, Picasa hands off the rest of the process to your web browser instead of handling the nuts and bolts of your order itself. This makes sense for Google as they don't want to have to hardcode too much knowledge of a photo shop's workings into their app.

Somewhat irrelevantly, the only time I hit a bit of a problem with ordering this way was when I selected my local Ritz camera store for pickup, only to be told that they were unavailable at the time. This was the case until this morning. My assumption is that they were still getting things set up after the earthquake at the weekend.