I love Picasa. I really do. But what I recently discovered something that is almost unforgivable. Picasa does not automatically rotate your images in disc, and when you manually save changes (rotates included) it forcefully saves the original picture, consuming valuable disk space.
I am bothered with this for a reason. I recently acquired a MacBook and I dumped iPhoto after just a few minutes of using it because it attempted to hide the actual pictures from me via any other application. You’re stuck with iPhoto when you use it, and I like to access my pictures directly with my file manager or even with other applications (Photoshop, Gimp, whatever). Then I started looking for alternatives and Picasa popped up in no time as a very good one, and free (as in beer). I remember I used it on Windows but never committed fully to it, but now I have been happy with it for while on the Mac, and have invested a considerable amount of time tuning my very dear pictures collection, mostly in terms of organization and fixing rotations, because I prefer to do other editing tasks in more professional programs. In terms of organization it got even better just few weeks after I started using it, when it introduced facial recognition technology, allowing me to organize and browse my pictures by the people appearing on them, and with a minimal effort. It was all a sweet honey moon.
Pictures rotated in Picasa are still in its original state on disk.
But a couple of days ago I wanted to lighten a dark picture I had recently shot, and fired up Photoshop just to be surprised. I went back to Picasa to check it out, but the picture was correctly oriented there. I looked for the picture in Finder and opened it with Preview, and I even bothered copying it over the network to a PC to open it with Windows Picture Viewer. Even Picasa in the PC got it wrong! Everywhere I tried, the picture was wrongly rotated, as it originally came from my camera. Only Picasa on my Mac got it “right”.
After some digging and research, I discovered that this is not a bug but a “feature”. Picasa merely stores the rotation info of each image in the .picasa.ini file in the directory where the image resides. This is faster and safer, since the original pictures are never modified, or so they say. And there’s an option (hidden in the right click menu of a picture that has been rotated or modified in any way within Picasa) to save the changes to disk. But wait! Do not allow you to think for a moment that this could solve the issue. This will save a copy of the original, forcefully, with no way to choose not to do this at my own risk.
I am not an expert of picture editing, but what’s the risk involved in picture rotating? If there’s a risk, why Photoshop or Gimp do not alert me about doing this? Why is this the very first software that avoids at all costs to actually let go the original un-rotated image?
A few weeks ago I would have dumped Picasa completely, but face recognition is kind of addictive. I have already invested time in tagging my friends and relatives, and it’s fun to play slideshows of a certain person, or even slideshows of pictures where two given persons appear. So Picasa stays for now. But I’ll be doing everything else from Adobe Bridge, even importing from cameras, copying and moving pictures around, etc.
Just stumbled across your blog through Google, nice photos by the way
. About.com answers your question. It has to do with JPEG compressing using a lossy algorithm, that is to say, what it saves to disc isn’t exactly what was originally opened; so even when Photoshop rotates there are some artefacts, or blemishes, that result — you just can’t see ‘em. Does that help?
I faced this problem like a year ago, when I bought my DSLR. My images are 10MB in RAW format and about 5MB in low compressed JPEG. My typical session photo is no less than 120 shots. Looking for a good program to manage my photos, I realize that the best way is to use a non destructive image editing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_editing) software like Lightroom (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/). You can’t overwrite the original images. Professionals love this editing workflow (not me). The reality is that it is pretty damn faster than anything you can do with Photoshop, both from the user experience and from the program execution point of view.
Of course, if you only want to rotate, I agree with you, this kind of thinking sucks.
Good luck!
I am not a professional photographer, and I do not have disk space to spare. Imagine if every picture I rotate gets duplicated on disk! I already have a little under 20Gb of pictures and growing.
BTW, I do have lightroom, but I haven’t had the time to figure it out. Maybe I’ll give it a try soon. Thanks for your comment.
Yea, believe it or not, Picasa is doing it correctly. Image cataloging programs ought to treat your images as negatives–that is to say: inviolate. Lightroom already does this, and Photoshop & Bridge participate in a complex post-processing workflow to provide the same non-destructive capability. This is true of JPEGs, and obviously true of RAW files; RAW is considered to be a read-only format from which some other format must be rendered (JPEG, GIF, etc)–if you’ve ever wondered why you can’t edit and save back to RAW format in any image editing program, that’s why.
The problem here is not with Picasa, actually–it’s with your camera. Just about every digital camera since 5 years ago has included an auto-rotation feature that uses sensors in the camera at the time the shutter is released to determine orientation–that should be stored in the RAW file and correctly reflected automatically. On occasion if you’re moving the camera during the exposure or shooting straight up or down it might get it wrong, in which case you need to deal with it manually…but unless you specialize in those kind of shooting techniques, shouldn’t be a problem 99% of the time.
I do know about the auto-rotation feature, but my camera is brand new (although not a professional on) and it does not have the auto-rotation feature. Its a Canon Powershot A480, and I have inspected the picture’s metadata (EXIF info) for the rotation info, but it is not there. Maybe you mean every professional camera since 5 years ago, but amateur cameras, at least mine, does not have this.
I start to sense that this sacred preservation of the original is something for pro photographers, but for average amateur pictures like mine it’s not that important. Picasa should at least have the option and warn you about it.
BTW, I have read that there is a way to rotate a JPG picture without any lost of quality at all, but the picture’s size must be a multiple of 16 o 8 or something like that. Most standard pictures resolutions today comply with this, so I don’t see why not making these applications use that algorithm.
Non-distructive editing is the way to go, but Picasa misses the two obviously appropriate ways to do non-distructive rotation:
1) adding EXIF rotation tags
2) lossless JPEG rotation (transformation)
Every cam or mobile phone does 1), and all common free image organizars _exept_ Picasa do 2), some do both.
Well, my Canon PowerShot A480 does not add EXIF rotation tags to my pictures. Fortunately, I found out that I can rotate the pictures in the camera, manually, before I download them to Picasa, so I do not have to use the picasa rotate feature anymore.
I would love to find a Picasa replacement, but except for these issues with rotating, Picasa is the best that I have found. So I live with the compromise of rotating before with another tool (either my camera or with Adobe Bridge) and then import to Picasa.