# Picasa Sucks Ass

So I've been scanning in old negatives from the family "archives" lately. It fits in well at work, since I can spend 2 minutes loading new negatives and let it do its thing for 45 minutes. Forced breaks, and all that.

So I have some 450 scans so far, I need to start organizing, rotating, etc. Since I'm doing this at work on a windows machine, I decide to give Picasa a go. Big mistake.

First, Picasa doesn't actually rotate the images on disk. I don't know where it stores the rotated images, but it's not in the original directory. This means that I spent 30 minutes rotating images for nothing. Joy.

Second, and more hateful, it pops up status messages in the lower-right corner of the screen. Messages you can't get rid of. For example, I exported some 250 pictures from picasa (which, btw, you can only export in jpeg format) and the entire time there was a status message in the lower right corner. Worse, even though they provide a close button, IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK. It'd go away, and then come back with the next status update.

It's the same story when scanning images in. Every time a new image appears in the directory, Picasa pops up a status message. You can't get it to not do this. HATE.

If this is what Google passes off as desktop software then I pray they never take on Microsoft head to head. They may be search gods, but they have a long way to go before they're usability gods, or even usability novices.

posted at: 2006 May 30 01:37 UTC | category: tech | (story link)