A look into: Google's Picasa
By Nicolas on Thursday, October 16 2008, 21:47 - Picture Manager Comparison - Permalink
Not much to say on the picture manager side, as Picasa 2.7.0 does not support picture tagging. Structure is based on folders. Not very exciting and I should say that I hardly see how it can manage my 6 years catalog of thousands of pictures (let alone finding something).
I've tested as well the raw support and to my surprise raw are very well supported. The derawing goes very fast (I have a 4 cores processor). Most of the editing is basic and simple and most importantly the results looks very good. To get a similar result, I would have spent twice as much time on Digikam my reference tool.
On the other hand, it lacks the granularity control that would have allowed a Digikam or professional tools such as Photoshop (that I use on a daily basis at work). And as such if the results will fit for most needs, it is clearly one step behind when you want to get excellent results (for an A3 printing for instance).
All in all, a good tool, but mostly oriented toward the entry level of the market (no rant here). Its features and ease of use would probably fit most of the needs (if not all) of a casual user.
Comments
No tagging? I think you didn't look carefully enough, as there is possibility to attach keywords to pictures ("View->Keywords" in the menu, keyboard shortcut Ctrl-K). Also you can give a picture a title. And then it possible to collect pictures into albums (although you cannot select pictures across different folders). And for both real folders and albums you can add time, location and comment information. All the afore-mentioned will be saved into image files' EXIF data.
And then Picasa's search function (that text field next to looking glass icon in upper right side of window) can be used to find pics to matching the afore-mentioned information. Although, there is one problem with the search: it seems impossible to force it to show just exact matches, eg. you want find pictures, which have keyword "cat", but Picasa still shows also all pictures with keyword "cathedral" or those marked to be taken in "Catalonia" or anything else beginning with "cat".