The Free World: Picassa Coming to GNU/Linux.
February 20, 2006 by Jon
Filed under The Free World.
I know by now that this is hardly news, but Google is working with Code Weavers to produce a GNU/Linux version of Picasa.
I have a number of thoughts about this. First, about Picasa itself. My fiancee is an Interior Designer and as such has an absolute truckload of images on her computer. She uses a variety of image manipulation tools, one of which is Picasa. I’ve used Picasa as well in my dark Windows days, but not to the extent that Kelly uses it.
I really like Picasa as an image organizer application. On the flip side, I really hate Picasa as an image editing application. There are some fairly sophisticated image manipulation tools within Picasa, but exactly how they work is a complete mystery to Kelly (and I). It seems that sometimes the changes she makes to images never materialize within the file on the hard drive. Other times, the changes do take effect. Very disconcerting and annoying.
Code Weavers: You may not recognize the name right away, but these are the guys who brought us the badly named Cross Over Office application. Cross Over Office is basically a commercial version of Wine that has been extended to work with specific Windows applications. The Windows programs that work under Cross Over work very well, but the list is limited. I spoke with Jon Parshall of Code Weavers last August and he described his company as a ‘coin-operated software company’ when I asked if I was likely to see .NET supported in Cross Over any time soon. I guess the coins are flowing if Google is footing the bill to get Picassa working with Cross Over.
So what does this mean? Well, politically it’s nice to see Google paying some attention to use GNU/Liux users. Rumour has it that Google not only runs on all GNU/Linux servers, but they also use a version of Ubuntu in-house as a desktop solution. It’s nigh time that they started spreading that love outwards.
I’m not sure why they picked Picassa, but whatever. Everything has to start somewhere, I guess. On technical merit, since the solution to bring Picassa to GNU/Linux involves Cross Over, that means that this isn’t a ‘port’ of Picassa to GNU/Linux (however, it’s rumoured that Cross Over will be embedded so we’ll never notice). It’s still plain old Picassa for Windows and Cross Over is supplying the Windows translation layer to make it work. Whatever, as long as it works.
All in all, I’m pretty happy about this. Both because it’s nice to see Google look our way and also because Picassa is a pretty neat application for us laypeople.
Picasa has this bizzare setup where instead of editing the image itself, it edits a copy of it someplace else. According to the Picasa documentation, “Picasa was designed to be non-destructive to your original pictures. This is why edits and changes made to pictures in Picasa do not change the original picture files.”
If you want to save the changes you make to your photos in Picasa, the most reliable method I know is to select the image you’ve edited and click the “Export” button in the lower right corner of the screen. That will let you save a copy of the image with the edits.
It’s irritating as all get out. I wish there was an option to have it make changes to the original picture files.
If I remember correctly, some Picasa edits are actually destructive and do not first make a backup… such as rotating images.
Kelly Penguin Girl uses Picasa madly these days and has discovered that it is indeed ‘non destructive’ and, as Blog Jones points out, annoying as all get out.
I’m a totaly newb with the thing, so I don’t notice all the shortcomings of it. I just fired it up once, watched it find all my pictures, and spend an hour drooling over the pretty interface. I still enjoy using it the odd time I’m on a Windows box and am looking forward to using it on my Linux box.
I can see how Picasa could be a little annoying to power users.