How would I change Picasa
I don’t think I’m a photography enthusiast. I don’t take photos too often. But still I have thousands of photos in my hard drives. I believe organizing photos is a headache for many of us, esp. people who always take their cameras with them.
I’m using Picasa to organize and upload my photos to Picasa Web Album. Generally speaking, Picasa is quite friendly and easy to use. However, it’s not really a pleasant experience for me to get tons of photos in order.
Name tags
Face detection is a great feature for newer versions of Picasa. We can group photos of friends based on their faces. But this feature becomes terribly confusing when I started to use it.
The first problem is: the name tags are linked to Google Contacts by default. This could cause a lot of trouble because they don’t have the same implication.
People love to take photos with celebrities. And I would be very proud to tag Michael Schumacher in my photos (instead of just “ignore” him). But he is very unlikely to be one of my contacts and it’s also pointless for me to make a personal album for him. Because I might not be able to take another picture with him for the rest of my life.
Generally, there’re people that we know. We’d like to tag them in my photos. But they are not our contacts, they are not part of our lives. We meet people by chance. Their photos are part of our memories but it’s simply impractical to create an album for every single person we’ve ever known about.
And moreover, relationships change over time. You may not really know someone when you met him for the first time. But you might want to make a personal album for him from the previously ignored face tags of him.
This leads to another major problem of name tags: you can either tag someone or ignore him or her. That’s not a big problem though. The fatal flaw is that: you can’t easily bring back a face tag you’ve ignored.
All the ignored faces are grouped into one album. If you accidentally ignored a face, the only way for recovery is to locate it in the “ignored faces album”(#) . But there could be tons of ignored faces because a majority of faces in your photos are passers-by, according to my experience. Just think about the photos you took at exhibitions or downtown streets.
(#) It’s very strange that sometimes you can’t find this album after every face is tagged. I don’t know if this is a bug or a feature.
My suggestion:
What we need is simple: show all ignored faces in a photo or a folder. If we could easily find a face we ignored before, we could tag them anytime. This is a feature that should be built-in when the face detection was first released.
In addition, add a “reset” or “rescan” button for photos and folders. Then make name tags deletable, thus users could completely delete name tags they don’t want if they messed things up. Moreover, some detected faces are simply not faces. They should be deleted, not “ignored”.
The major design fault behind these problems is that: face tagging is not an one-off action. Relationships change, so do name tags. Users need to keep maintaining their name tags to make the most out of face detection.
This seems to be much more complicated than current design. Yes it is. But when the face detection and clustering mechanism is not reliable enough, it’s definitely more reasonable to empower users and provide them more control.
Folders and modifications
My mum asked me the same question several times: why she can’t find the modified photo in Windows Explorer while she can see them in the Picasa photo library.
Because Picasa doesn’t automatically save your modifications to disks. You’ll need to click “save” to save and make backups for the original photo.
Picasa acts like an abstraction layer above the physical files. If you keep your actions inside Picasa, everything should be perfect. But if you want to do something with the actual files (rotate them or move them), you’ll find that things are messed up inside Picasa. Maybe you’ll get a 180-degree-rotated photo or lose all your modification over many photos.
I understand that this abstraction is necessary because it’s difficult to maintain the consistency between what’s inside the application and what’s actually in the file system. This will work fine if we had a closed file system. But sadly, that’s not true.
My suggestion:
Make a compromise, highlight unsaved photos and prompt for saving when the user tries to navigate away from the application, show the conflicts and inconsistency between the application and file systems and let the user fix them.
Or take a brave leap, encapsulate the folders of photos, make them inaccessible to average users, and provide convenient ways to allow users export them or modify them with external applications.
I don’t think there’s a good way in between.
Version control
I was really surprised when I find out that Picasa made a backup after I rotated a photo and saved it. That is to say, the space needed to save a portrait photo is twice as large as a landscape one. Thus, I’ll have to manually delete all .picasaoriginals folder after I fixed up all the orientation of my photos to prevent Picasa from wasting my disk space.
On the other hand, this type of version control doesn’t work with external photo editors. When I’ve modified a photo with Photoshop, I’ll have to save the original photo manually and then I have 2 very similar photos in my Picasa library: the modified one and the original one. Then I have to tag the faces twice, and I must be very careful with them when I want to create a Picture Collage or start a slide show.
My suggestion:
Photo stacks will be a much better idea to control versions of a photo. Sometimes we take several pictures to make sure we have the best shot. These photos should be grouped together instead of scattering around. And we should be able to choose a cover photo for this stack. Thus, the stack of photos could be treated as a single photo with different version (including different shots, originals, enhanced version or even different sizes).
This could be done automatically or manually. But either way, the user should be allowed to make changes to stacks easily.
(I’ve been told that there’s stack feature in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, but I haven’t got a chance to try it yet.)
External drive
When you have tons of photos, it’s not very likely that all of them are in your built-in hard drive. Picasa supports photos on external drives, but a big issue is neglected, which caused my a lot of troubles: the problem of drive-letters.
Picasa watches the specified folders for changes. It’ll import new photos and remove photos which no longer exist. Picasa will reserve the information when an external drive is disconnected and the photos will appear immediately when the drive is back on-line.
However, drive-letters will change in Windows.
For example, you’ve got an external drive with a folder for photos namely “F:Photos”. It was imported into Picasa and Picasa took hours to scan all the photos inside the folder. You’ve disconnected the external drive afterwards.
One day, you tried to copy some photos from your friend’s hard drive. The hard drive is connected and you opened Picasa, then tragedy happened: Picasa found that there was no such folder named “Photos” in “F:” because that was your friend’s disk. Thus Picasa deleted all the information about “F:Photos” from its database. The next time you connect your external drive, Picasa will take several hours to rescan everything again. And you’ll have to “ignore” all the faces you’ve previously ignored after face detection is finished.
This is true and it happened three times to me. I felt very terrible when Picasa throws my data away again and again and again simply because the drive letters have changed.
My suggestion:
Don’t make any stupid assumption about the drive letters of Windows file system. They’re unreliable and change from time to time. When an external drive is disconnected, show the folders as “off-line”. If the folder is disappeared like what happened when your friend’s hard disk is connected to your computer, don’t just prune the database without asking the user. And the most importantly, provide options that allows the user to link off-line photos back to its actual folder on disk in case the drive-letter is changed.
Again, I think features for external drives are supposed to be designed like this in the first place.
