The importance of Google’s Picasa Web Album is really not in itself, as “yet-another-Flickr-contender”. It’s all about the integration (albeit limited) to Google’s Picasa photo management application on the desktop.
If you’re the type the likes to tweak your photos around, fine-tune them a little, doing it on the desktop is still far easier and faster then on the Web. And if you’re like me (i.e. not a pro) you probably find Photoshop an overkill. Picasa is just right for photo manipulation, doing more than the basics, but not overly complex, and the price of zero (standard for web-apps, not so for the desktop) is quite unbeatable.
While Flickr was an independent startup, I placed my bets on Google acquiring them; there was so much similarity in their approach to photo management, the (then) revolutionary breakaway from rigid folder/catalog structures to labels/tags made would have made it a perfect marriage. I still can’t believe Google let this slip away to Yahoo. With that deal all hope of easily uploading from Picasa to Flickr evaporated: the only theoretically easy way, emailing to Flick has never properly worked.
That’s the void that Picasa Web Albums fill, even if not-so-perfectly for now: have an easy way of working with your photos offline and online. Sure, it has shortcomings, no private albums, no synchronization …etc – I acknowledge all of these, but remember, Picasa 1.0 was not much to talk about and Picasa 2 came out as everyone’s favorite. At least we now have the same platform on and offline.
In fact I am sure that what started with photos will continue in many other areas, including the typical personal productivity / office type applications: we need seamless, continuous computing, whether on the web or locally. This is a subject I’ve been wanting to write about ever since my Zoho – the “Safer Office” article, and will come back to it with more detail in a few days.
Tags: picasa, web album, photo management, photo album, flickr, google, labeling, tagging, web office, office 2.0, zoho, zoho suite
Google Killing the Picasa Brand?