Photo Search: Google Picasa 2 Vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2

Picasa, the photo software company that Google acquired in last July, has released the second version of its namesake Picasa photo management tool, offering advanced photo editing tools to the public for free.

In this article, I’m going to talk about some of the new features in Picasa but come at them from a very personal perspective, that of someone who has used rival product Adobe Photoshop Album 2 for over the past year to organize and manage my photos.

With all the buzz we’ve had about desktop search over the past few months, none of those new products are going to help you find your photos more easily. Take Microsoft’s desktop search product, for example. Sure, it can locate photo images. But it’s only able to index the words that appear within the meta data that your camera automatically adds, as well as any words in the photo filenames.

So need to find all the digital pictures of a particular family member? Good luck. Your photos almost certainly won’t contain enough information to make this possible. Without decent photo management software — and a bit of effort on your part — it’s not going to happen. But with them both, magical things can happen!

For example, I can easily find all the pictures of my youngest son with a click. Want to see all the pictures of my family during Christmas over the past four years, taken from when I first got a digital camera. No problem! All the pictures of birthday parties? Simple. Just my oldest son’s various birthday parties? Easily done.