Picasa review

A friend replaced his windows desktop with a Mac G5. He showed me the photo editing software iPhoto on it and I was mightily impressed. It is a cool photo editor, rich with features and extremely easy to use. Unfortunately Apple makes iPhoto only for Mac's. People have been clamouring for a Windows edition, but so far Apple hasn't budged.

Another friend recommended Picasa as the closest thing to iPhoto on Windows. You can download it from Google. I played with it this weekend and the first thing I noticed was that it eats up a lot of memory. You'd be well advised to have a half gig of RAM if not more. My old desktop that I rarely use has 256 MB RAM and it took at least 40-50 seconds to startup.

Picasa is much better than the software that comes with digital cameras. On startup it immediately scans your system and locates all image files including movies. You can turn that option off and run scans manually.

The timeline feature is nifty and neatly arranges photographs in a chronological order. It was amazing to see how many pictures I have compiled over the past four years.

The slideshow option is cool and you can play music while it loops through a bunch of photographs. By default, the slideshow displays low resolution images. If you choose high resolution images, it will consume more system resources and slow down your system further. By default, the images are full screen and I could not find a way to change the display settings. I would have liked the option to adjust the size of the photograph being displayed. I did find a workaround where I accidentally hit Ctrl-Alt-Del. I cancelled out of it and returned to the screen. Instead of full screen images, the pictures were 1/3rd the size and centered. It made for much better viewing.


I prefer the slideshow in iPhoto which has a movie style format, where photographs slide in and out and the software manages to zoom in on the main subject matter of the photograph.

I tried making a movie of a trip to India which contained about 150 photographs. The movie was in AVI format. For some reason, I was unable to run it. I suspect it was because my system was heavily loaded.

All in all, Picasa is a decent alternative to iPhoto on Windows. Of course I'd jump if Apple were to release iPhoto on Windows in the future.