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.

Having migrated to Mac not so long ago, I am aware that Apple’s default picture managing software already had this feature, although I cannot really say how it worked. I did try iPhoto for a few hours on my first days with my new MacBook, but I immediately hated it for trying to hide my pictures from me. Picasa at least respects my organizational scheme at the file-system level, instead of imposing me one, and I am still able to access my pictures through Finder.

As Picasa recognizes faces, you can add information about this people as you tag them. It can even use (and sync with) your Google Account contacts if you are signed in to Picasa Web Albums. It would be nice though, if it gave you the choice in Mac OS X to use the system’s address book instead, or alternatively. And as a side note, face recognition is not the only new feature of Picasa 3.5, also including in the package geo-tagging with a Google Maps panel withing Picasa’s interface, and more. For the time being, this new version has only been released for Windows and Mac in its English version. Non-English speaking users, or Linux fans, will have to wait a bit. Not to say that Mac people should be completely happy though, because I am still waiting for Picasa to port the very nice picture viewer that it installs on Windows.

In the mean time, I can enjoy watching a slideshow of pictures with me and my girlfriend in it, or detailing how my niece’s face has changed over time since she was born just a few years ago. Face recognition rocks. But beware, if you are a fanatic of organization, it can get become addictive!

PS: I wanted to include a screenshot, but I don’t feel right to publish an image with lots of pictures of faces and names of actual people, without their consent, and painting black areas over names and faces renders the screenshot useless for its original purpose. So I am going on without it. If you want to see it working, download the program and give it a try.