Picasa Web Album: Don’t Compare it to Flickr

Disclaimer: I process a lot of images, and use iMatch to catalog them. I have only given Picasa a passing glance in the past due to its inability to manage offline media. I’m looking at this purely from a “simple web gallery/sharing system” and not from an image management or editing view.

That said, I signed up with Picasa Web Albums as soon as they were released.

I’ve uploaded one album full of images - it can be viewed here. It’s just the set of images that was used on Dogcaught.com during the month of March.

Random thoughts:

• Why can’t I tag photos?
• Why can’t I search photos?
• The default setting is that anyone with Picasa can “one-click” download entire albums to their PC. I would think this should be turned off by default (it’s a user-configurable option).
• How come I can’t select multiple images for upload (at the same time) using Firefox (feature is IE-only)?

It’s an ok web gallery. It’s easy. It’s functional. It doesn’t do anything that Flickr won’t do, other than integrate with a photo editor I don’t use. I hope to see some social networking features integrated as the product evolves. Lots of people want to compare this to Flickr, but Flickr’s strength is in tagging, sharing, and networking. Which is a totally absent aspect of Picasa.