To friends who are trying to use Windows as their primary operating system, owning a digital camera can be a pretty unrewarding experience if you rely on the software that comes with your camera (using a Mac with iPhoto you’ll never get round to putting the Camera manufacturer’s CD in your machine). To them, I recommend Picasa, an reasonably good iPhoto clone which comes free from Google.
Now Google have launched Picasa Web and even better an iPhoto plugin for the Mac users. This is Google doing it right: at Google labs there is a Linux beta version of Picasa which has been developed using a customised version of Wine and offers almost all the features of the Windows version. They’re making sure they are including users of all platforms.
So, I thought I’d install the plugin and give it a try, and in so doing I’ve posted half a dozen pictures from my trip to Scotland last weekend:
Uploading was extremely slow, but the web albums look really good (far better than the static pages iPhoto posts to .Mac, if you have it). You can resize and zoom in on the photos, there’s a slick slideshow function and an RSS feed. And as well as uploading from iPhoto, you can fully manage your albums through the web interface: uploading, reordering and reorientating. Very promising.
