Google (as it announces earlier this year) released a Linux version of a fine app for storing, searching and manipulating phosos – Picasa. What is interesting, the company instead of making a native app from scratch, decided to use Wine and integrate it in such a way that it is almost invisible by the user.

Pic 1. Picasa for Linux

Picasa offers automatic collection building and fast image search, as well as many other functions available in programs graphical viewvers. What distincts Picasa is a really clean and intuitive user interface, as well as the ability to easily perform simple image manipulation using a few mouse clicks.

In detail, Picasa can perform such operations as:

• contrast, brightness and color adjustment
• removing the red-eye effect easily (one click on the photo!)
• cropping the image to fit the required size (like 4×6, 5×7, etc)
• special effects like sepla, black and white photo, focus, etc)

It’s hard to say a lot about stability after a few days of using the app, but it’s clear now that Picasa for Linux is a little slower than native apps like GQView, gThumb or F-SPot (it’s not very slow though). When functionality is compared, it’s hovever a worthy trade-off since Picasa beats all the available apps (including F-Spot and DigiKam) quite badly now.

Tha program can be downloaded from a special webpage Picasa for Linux. It’s available as an RPM package (for Red Hat/Fedora/Suse/Mandriva x86), a DEB (Debian/Ubuntu x86) or as a self-extracting archive (for the rest of the distros). Wine is pre-packaged so it doesn’t require any configuration. In Ubuntu Dapper Drake the installation process was a double click on the downloaded DEB file in Nautilus. Quite Windows-like

A little gallery of using Picasa for Linux below. Any additional comments are welcome!

Pic 2. Picasa – simple corrections	Pic 3. Picasa – tuning
Pic 4. Picasa – effects	Pic 5. Picasa – search

Of course there are also little problems. The lack of UTF-8 support is one of the most irritating of them. The menu looks awful (although the rest of the app looks pretty well). On the other side, some details are well done, like the shell integration, Linux system folders adjustment in the open-file dialogs or the possibility to easily import photos from the digital camera.

Hopefully this is just the beginning, and the next version will have a native Linux port instead of the Wine-integrated hybrid.

More info

• Picasa for Linux – download site
• Picasa for Linux available! – on the Wine mailing list
• First impressions of Picasa – Google’s first rate Graphics suite for Linux