Google has announced that they’ve released a “port” of their photo management software Picasa for GNU/Linux.
There are a couple of sad things to note about this sorry-excuse-for-a-port.
1. It’s not free (as in freedom that is). It’s proprietary…about like installing Opera as your web browser.
2. It hasn’t actually been ported, despite their claims. It runs through Wine, and although I can’t imagine how cheesy and windows-ish the interface must look, I also can’t bear the thought of downloading it and making fun of it.
3. Digikam, F-Spot, heck, even LPhoto are very good photo management programs for KDE/GNOME desktops and they’re free and open source. Why then, would someone want Picasa? Just because they can?
I understand what Google is trying to do, make “Linux” popular. They’ve made over 100 patches for Wine, to improve it in running other Windows proprietary apps. The problem I see with this is that they’re too little, too late. I can understand someone who runs a proprietary app when there is not viable free software alternative, but with photo management, that simply isn’t the case.
I predict that those few people who do download it will probably grow tired of its bugginess (not to mention, ugliness) and lack of integration with their desktop and come running back to Digikam or F-Spot. Until I can download the Picasa source code and it’s integrated with my web browser, e-mail program, and word processors seamlessly (i.e. drag and dropping), exports to my photo gallery, creates digital mpeg videos, edits my photos, allows me to rate them, categorize them, open them in Gimp for superior editing, show me an Open-GL-based slide show with cool digital effects, and so on, it has zero chance of replacing my Digikam.
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Picasa has some nice features that don’t yet exist as a package in any of the free linux apps. True it is running via WINE and while the interface isn’t native to linux it’s not very natural for Windows either. If anything Picasa looks a bit OSX-like.
At least for the latest Google Earth beta – there appears to be a native implementation available in linux.