Picasa project is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organised by date with folder names you will recognise.
You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organised.
Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. And Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures - you can email, print photos home, make gift CDs, and even post pictures on your own blog.
Toward the very end, everything was looking great except that the initial assumption that most cameras emulate storage devices turned out to be wrong. Fortunately, Marcus Meissner just happened to decide to implement libgphoto support; his patch appeared at the perfect moment, and now Picasa supports both common flavors of cameras.
Two features left out of the Linux version were CD-ROM burning (the driver Picasa uses is hard to support under Wine) and movie playback (Wine doesn't have the necessary codecs). Both are potentially fixable in a future version, but were beyond the scope of this first port.
One interesting challenge when shipping commercial apps for Linux is packaging -- do you choose RPM or Debian packages, or do you use a WIndows-style installer? The Picasa for Linux team chose all three, in hopes of pleasing everybody. (Let's see how well *that* works :-) The Windows-style installer was implemented using the open-source Loki installer, and a few patches were contributed back for that, too.
Requirements:
· Should work on any Linux system with Intel 386-compatible processor
· glibc 2.3.2 or greater, and a working X11 display system
· Desktop Integration features require a current version of Gnome or KDE
· Camera detection and integration requires kernel >= 2.6.13, hal >= 0.56, and gnome-volume-manager or equivalent
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Upload to Picasa Web Albums
· Use the new "Web Album" button to post your best photos online to share with friends and family.
· Download from Picasa Web Albums
· Download albums from Picasa Web Albums directly into Picasa using Firefox.
· Save edits to disk
· Save edits, undo saves, and revert to the original file with ease. We've got batch saving too! Picasa will even match the jpeg quality of the original. Right-click on your saved files to try the new "locate original" feature.
· Folder hierarchy views
· Browse through folders Explorer-style. Use the button at the top of your Albums List to try them out.
· Improvements to Import
· Import into an existing folder- we know you've wanted this feature for a long time! We've made importing photos from your camera faster too.
· Better RAW support
· Now you can work with RAW files from the Canon 30D, the Nikon D200, Adobe DNG files, and more.
· Internationalization Improvements
· Enable support for non-english languages.
· Many other enhancements
· Larger thumbnails, better caption editing, ability to configure the row of buttons, special "Starred Photos" album, search by ISO and focal length.
