PLAYED A BIT WITH Picasa 3 and its companion PicasaWeb today. I was a bit disappointed, but overall it was not a complete loss.

Why was I disappointed? The PicasaWeb integration seems a bit flimsy and it appears to be mostly one way (or at least the docs say so; but there is the Refresh Online Status button). Also, in an attempt to see just how smart Picasa is I did the following: 1) using Picasa I created an on-line album containing a number of pictures, 2) deleted my local copy of the album, 3) attempted to import the album from PicasaWeb to Picasa. I had hoped that Picasa would be smart enough to realize that the photos I was downloading were already in my collection, but, no, it needlessly downloaded every photo and I then had two copies of each of those photos. Oh well.

I am also not crazy about the left hand side bar for Picasa. It shows folders and albums (and probably other things) but there appears to be no way to make it show the albums first. Sometimes they show up at the top of the list and sometimes they are at the end. I can't figure out why this is, but I know that I always want my albums to be first and the folders to come second.

Picasa is still great at simple image manipulation and at categorizing the photos. I hope that someday the web integration is much better than it is now.