I see there’s a new version of Picasa out (beta v3) which has the feature I’ve really been wanting – the ability to sync albums from the picasa software to the picasaweb website. Previously you had to just upload photo’s, and if you changed them, scrap the web copy and re-upload them. Now it looks like you can create a local album, and upload it, and then if you add / change photo’s in the album you just resync with the web copy, which is going to be very nice.

I just wish Picasa would pick some kind of standard for storing captions inside PNG files, instead of leaving them as totally separate in the picasa.ini file (it stores captions in the EXIF data for JPG files, but there’s no clear standard for doing so with PNG’s). I stopped converting my scans into JPG’s when storage became so cheap, I’d much rather keep them as PNG’s because you never know what you’re going to do with them in a few years. Hopefully it’ll make it into a later release.

If you’ve got a lot of photo’s and don’t use any software to manage them I can’t praise Picasa enough, it’s not perfect, but it’s really easy to use and I love the way you can make ‘edits’ to the photographs and the actual image file remains unchanged (unless you want to comit the changes) and the edits are stored as procedures somewhere else. Just great IMO.

Update:
UK Version is here http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa3-setup.exe