picasa
I tried new linux version
picasa on the weekend and
removed it again yesterday.
First I got picasa_2.2.2820-5_i386.deb, a 21MB file that will turn
out to use 79MB on disc. So there is nothing lightweight about it.
For me this isn't a big deal but I know not everyone has acres of
disc space.
When you first run it you have to agree to this massive licence
which no, I didn't read from top to bottom. Then you get to choose
between scanning the entire drive or selecting folders
individually.
I chose by accident the entire drive the first time and it took
forever, I mean almost an hour on a P4 3GHZ machine with 2GB's of
ram. So, don't choose this option :)
Once it's all done scanning I started poking around my pictures. I
have almost 7000 photo's so I am game for any app that organizes
them for me. I also have about 20 times that of photos for work
which are crying out for a decent organization tool.
So as photo app's go I quite like it, it has a unique interface
that's easy to use and some nifty effects tools, it has the usual
slide-show feature and a time-line feature that I quite liked. I am
not sure what toolkit they used but it looks like QT and feels very
much unlike a traditional "wine" app. It also has a batch edit
menu, a plus for sure and has, as you would expect, nice
integration with blogger and gmail.
The bad stuff however is pretty bad. Picasa uses tons of ram and
CPU, scrolling with mouse for instance racks the CPU up to 100%,
for some reason keyboard scrolling doesn't.
It steals my window manager keys (ctrl+alt)
Picasa hard-codes this directory tree:
PicasaDocuments
|-- My Music
|-- My Pictures
`-- My Video
yuck! not only capitals, but spaces too :( I guess this is one of
the problems with it not being a native linux app.
I also see no obvious way to include or exclude hidden folders,
which if you choose /home as a top level directory to scan, then it
starts wading through folders like .thumbnails and .icons, which
really sucks.
For me its too greedy resource wise, and too slow to keep around so
I removed it. I wish they had done this with Google Earth to be
honest instead of Picasa but perhaps that will come too one day. I
tried to run Gooogle Earth in wine but failed miserably.