Picasa 3 does none of this work on the desktop, and doesn't appear to gain any of the advantages of all this automation and facial recognition tagging. This makes it easy to, say, keep a running album automatically updated with photos of Cousin Erin or your parents, but this all has to be done on Picasa Web Albums. Easily the most impressive new feature is "Name Tags," which harnesses facial recognition technology to automatically identify people in photos. With Picasa 3 out of the way, we gave some of Picasa Web Album's new features a run-through to find that they compliment its desktop brethren's experience pretty well, if not awkwardly at times. Besides one-click publishing to YouTube there isn't much to get our shutters out of sync over, but it's still nice to have features that are sure to make mom and the family happy come holiday season. Users can group a selection of photos into a simple movie, pick from a handful of transitions and resolutions (all the way up to 1080p), add text slides, and apply an audio track. Last but not least in Picasa 3's repertoire of new tricks is a basic movie maker with YouTube integration. Picasa's image viewer doesn't seem to take any longer to load when compared to Vista's default of Windows Photo Gallery, and usually seemed to be a bit snappier in our testing. The effect is nice (though arguably unnecessary) and reminiscent of various "Lightbox" JavaScript image packages you may have seen on some websites and blogs. A media strip sits below, just above the Windows task bar, containing thumbnails of other images in the folder and basic navigation controls. Double-clicking an image in Windows Explorer will evoke a dimming overlay over the desktop and any open applications, displaying a border-less full version of the photo with a slick scaling animation. BMP, and Google added some special sauce to the actual viewer if you opt to use it. A handful of basic supported image formats are checked by default, including. AdvertisementĪ unique new feature that Picasa 3 presents to users with a first-run wizard is the ability to take over Windows Explorer's duties as an image viewer. Let us know what your experience was like if you're doing work like this. We did not, however, perform any heavy lifting, such as dumping a couple hundred photos from a shoot or vacation into a shared folder. In our testing with adding new photos to a folder and making edits using various new tools (again, more in a moment), Picasa 3's automatic sync feature worked really well and kicked in immediately after every change we made. It also removes the need to find, install, and maintain some sort of third-party uploading tool, which is often the case with similar online services like Flickr, Photobucket, and SmugMug. This new feature by itself transforms Picasa and its web counterpart into a much more appealing solution for organizing and sharing photos, as it takes the complicated busywork out of publishing photos online. As you can imagine, this allows any new photos, or even changes made to existing photos, to be automatically synchronized up to Picasa Web Albums (a free Google Account is required), Google's Flickr competitor. Probably the most significant new feature in Picasa 3 is a new "Sync to Web" switch that adorns any folder or album. We haven't been heavy users of Picasa in the past, but the changes are definitely welcome and make the app feel more mature. Picasa's UI is tighter, with smaller buttons in some areas like its top toolbar, and it even adopts new UI tools like the button slider from the iPhone OS for toggling features like syncing an album or folder to Picasa Web Albums (more on that in a minute). Unfortunately, Picasa 3 is only available for Windows right now, with the Linux version still at 2.7 and a Mac version only rumored to be on its way before 2008 is over. Sporting a much more refined overall UI, Picasa 3's new features and publishing integration are easily worth more than 1,000 words (but that's about where we'll get in this piece). Picasa 3 for your Windows PC (make a Mac OS X client please) Since Picasa hinges in many ways on its desktop client, though, we'll start there. Google's Picasa announcement is two-fold, involving a desktop client and web service that are now much more closely integrated, so we'll try to cover them separately while pointing out the new ways in which they shake hands. Ars Technica took some time to dust off the old family photos to see what the new editing, publishing, and identifying features are all about. Google announced major updates yesterday to both components of its Picasa ecosystem: its desktop client and Web Albums, a service for displaying and sharing photos online.
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