Picasa is a piece of shit. Correction: Computers are a HUGE piece of shit. But Picasa also is a piece of shit.
I like the idea of Picasa. I mean, who doesn’t want professional quality photography editing software for free? But, the software itself is highly irritating.
Upon opening Picasa, I was accosted by Picasa’s “People” feature. It picks out faces of people in the photographs you upload to the program, asks you to tag them once & then organizes the photographs by person. So, for instance, if I’m looking for a specific picture of my mom, I go to the “Mom” folder, and can look through every picture I have of her. This would be fine, if I didn’t have to tag the person several times. It tries, and is sometimes very good at, to recognize similar faces as being the same person. But apparently I don’t look enough like myself in every picture, so I have gone through like 8 times and had to type “me” into the little box under the picture.
All I wanted to do was to make a banner for my blog, because the generic banner blogspot provided is not at all attractive to my sophisticated tastes and style. But, there I was, tagging everyone I know in EVERY picture in Picasa, because I clearly cannot say “Hey, I will do this later, Picasa!” since it kept popping up every couple of minutes saying “Who is this person!?!?”
Perhaps the most annoying feature of the “People” tagging thing is the fact that it even picks out faces in the background of the photos. Like, there’s a fat man eating a sandwich behind a picture of me in a diner, and Picasa is so concerned with whom that is. I don’t know who that fat man is, the picture is of me! You can’t even see his entire face!
After I got started, I realized that making this banner was going to be a long and irritating process, partly because I am still somewhat computer retarded, and mostly because Picasa is even more retarded than myself. Aside: I apologize to anyone who is offended by the word “retarded.” I figured out that I completely destroyed some really sweet pictures that I had, because Picasa automatically saves over any editing you do to that file instead of giving you the option of saving it as a new photo. I guess there is probably a way to do that, but I clearly don’t know how to do it because, again, I am somewhat computer challenged.
I got the stupid header up, and then the layout clashed with the header. And because Picasa is dumb, I cannot figure out how to change the background of the collage. Whatever. All in all, Picasa is a very frustrating experience.
