Saturday, October 16, 2004

Picasa is not Hello

Google bought Picasa and now offers Picasa for free. Picasa is similar to ACDSee in that they are both designed to help you categorize, organise and edit your digital picture collections. Picasa I found to be unintuitive. As a programmer I am usually pretty quick to understand even the strangest interfaces. I found it difficult to get new pictures into Picasa. However, Picasa made it easier than ACDSee to hide those embarassing family pictures but still keep them in searchable albums.

Hello is another instant messaging program. Just like the popular instant messengers, you add contacts and when they are online you can chat. The big difference is that Hello is designed to easily send pictures between contacts. Google has taken advantage of this to create Bloggerbot. Bloggerbot is a contact within Hello that you send your pictures you want to appear on your blog. Bloggerbot automatically posts the picture and your comment to your Blogger blog. Hello automatically resizes your picture for viewing in your post and makes the picture clickable to view the original size. For Blogspot (Blogger) users storage is absolutely free. Hello will also upload pictures to your server if you host your own blog.

I have tried Picasa and Hello. Although I have not uninstalled Picasa, I choose to use ACDSee instead. Hello I find to be an invaluable tool for posting pictures on my blog.