Windows Photo Gallery or Google’s Picasa

As some Google searches will prove, this has been a debate that has been going on for some time. I was actually faced with the same problem just today, and not because I wanted to write a post about it, but because I had a practical problem I needed to solve. The problem has two parts. One is solved by Picasa, the other is solved by Windows Photo Gallery. In the process, I tried to determine which is better, without success. I have developed a method though that works for me, so perhaps it has some workarounds that might for you too, read on!

First if all, let me state the problem. I travel, I take pics, I store my pics and look at them, try and find one from time to time. I want to be able to tag them, rate them, email them, upload them, geotag them all with one click, and this is proving to be very difficult. I took Windows Picture Gallery for a spin and I was amazed.

Tagging

The guys at Microsoft did an awesome job of making a program that not only organizes your photos but lets you search, filter and group them in productive ways. Best of all, and this is the point where Microsoft gets top marks, tags are stored inside the file info. This means that if I copy all the photos from my recent Prague visit to my girlfriend’s laptop, she won’t have to go and tag everything again, she will see all the tags I have put in and all the ratings I have chosen.

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Picasa on the other hand uses databases, which aren’t bad, but have two drawbacks. One is that they are separate from the files themselves, so if I reinstall my system and don’t use the special backup method I will loose all metadata (yes, this has happened, grrr). The other problem is that no matter how well a database works, it gets slower as the database grows. And we all know what the digital era did to us from a photo standpoint. “Oh wait, let me take 20 more pictures of this!”

I also enjoy Windows Gallery’s tagging structure a lot more. I can create child tags, that are part of larger ones. I won’t have an endless list of tags, I now have “Places” as a top level tag and “Places/Prague” as a child tag. This leaves me with an easily hand searched directory. I feel that Picasa doesn’t give you quite the flexibility it could here.

Extras

In the extras department Picasa wins by miles. The reason I started using Picasa in the first place was the ability to one-click upload whatever I want into Picasaweb, to share it with my friends. The other main selling point was geitagging, which allowed me to put my photos on the map, using Google Earth. There are tons of other extras like timelines, blogging utilities, and so on and so forth, but I think the above two are the most noteworthy. Windows Photo Gallery doesn’t have too much to offer here. It has some here and there, like Email, burn to disc, make a movie, but nothing Picasa couldn’t handle.

The problem

For me, the perfect system would allow me to write my metadata to the file itself. This way I could send my girlfriend all the photos packaged and ready for her viewing pleasure. It would also allow me to backup or reinstall my system in 3 minutes, instead of 3 grueling hours. I do also need easy uploading into Picasaweb, since the platform is great and I can really easily share my stuff. I also absolutely need geotagging, that is the most fun since bottled Ice Tea (Lipton, Lemon of course).

The solution

Those of you waiting for an extension, or radically awesome productivity and organization hack will be a bit disappointed. My solution is to ditch Picasa. I am a total Google lover and I love Picasa too, but it needed to be done. The reason is that uploading and geotagging can be done from Picasaweb itself, but there is no way Picasa will read tags from the files.

I am still thinking of not ditching it totally, but only using it for geotagging. Since I upload to specific galleries, like “Prague 2007″ I don’t really need tags on Picasaweb. I do want to see my photos on Google Earth (the desktop program), so it would be nice to be able to save them as places, which is much easier if I do the geotagging before the upload.

Conclusion

I’ll be damned if I know which is better. Windows Photo Gallery is much better at managing and organizing I think, while Picasa has better other features. If you don’t need such great organization go for Picasa, it’s awesome, if you desperately want to put your photos in order, go for Windows Photo Gallery.