Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Picasa, photo album applications, and our personal memories


I have noticed a few wishlist items that are not yet included in Picasa. Iwork on both PC and Mac platforms, but this statement should also be taken to include Linux platforms as well.
One of the long standing issues of digital photography management has been been related to tagging, file naming, and captioning of photos.
What is really needed is an open, published standard for the handling of captions, file names, and titles. Users invest a ton of time and energy into labeling their photos, and if you remember that the annotations on the back of physical photos are very useful for identifying to historians and descendants who is in a photograph, likewise, captions and labels are equally important and deserve a level of care which is not yet present in the tools available today. Furthermore, since we are all embarking into the realm of introducing video and audio media into our personal lives and histories, we should consider applying a similar open source standard framework to applications that display or host these file types.
The goal should be that where ever the image file is sent, the image is accompanied by the relevant captioning data, and is securable by the sender or creator.
One thing the latest Picasa 3.5 does do reasonably well is apply (c) copywright text information into the image itself so one can post it to the internet, and at least have demonstrable evidence that the photographer did attempt to protect their intellectual property rights for the image. It's only drawback is the file management, locating the originals and duplicates is a bit confusing to say the least. You also have to "trick" the program into actually labeling the photos, since the option only exists when your are attempt to upload the photos to the picasa site forcing you to follow a convoluted work flow to label your photos uploading, then downloading them locally for later use.
As for captioning labeling etc, I noticed this was a problem when I migrated FROM iPhoto to Picasa. I had hoped that Picasa would serve as a conduit so I could migrate from Mac to Windows and keep all the captioning information for the 5000+ photos in the library. Picasa ignores the captioning and albums in iPhoto. Picasa only imports the file name and the folders. All of this information in a XML file which could, in theory, be read by another application. The API is published since iPhoto plug-ins for Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa all allow the captions to be exported to the related web photo servers. Picasa's local client simply ignores the information.
iPhoto itself also ignores this information since if you back up your photos, suffer a catastrophic failure, then resotre, the XML file often does not work with the restored data.
On Windoze, Picasa has a better excuse since there are endless photo album/management software applications, it can not really be expected that Picasa would interact with any of them very well since there are so many. However, Picasa on Windoze and Mac does not recognize if you have Picasa web albums online already, and then match up your pre-existing local photos accordingly. It assumes you uploaded the photos from that Picasa location. You can download an album, but you end up with duplicates and a lot of work sorting them afterwards.

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