The only native application that seems to get much love at Google is Chrome, and that's chiefly because it's a window on Web apps. Google Talk has been sidelined for years while Gmail Chat continues to advance. Google Earth's abilities are gradually being built into Google Maps. Indeed, Google doesn't have many native applications. Picasa's Picnik module doesn't care for very high-resolution photos. I found myself wondering about future development: will the editing engine of Picasa move to put Picnik at the center? Certainly, it's changed very little over the years, until this update, and Google likes its Web applications. Picasa already has synchronization abilities, but Picnik adds a new level. But I like the idea overall-a native application that dovetails with a Web application. Overall, I found the Picnik abilities awkwardly grafted onto Picasa. Once I restored the connection, all was well. I was able to edit a photo I'd opened, but saving it produced an error message. Maybe Google will be able to move this to Native Client someday for more efficient processing.Īlso, as you might expect from an embedded Web application, it doesn't work fully when offline.
GOOGLE PICASA FOR MAC PRO
Picnik is a Flash application, too, and using it pegged both my cores on the MacBook Pro on which I tested it. Of course, most folks who are serious enough to have files bigger than 16 megapixels will be using something besides Picasa, but the limits are illustrative of the awkward marriage of cloud computing and native applications.
And later, it suggested downsizing it even more to speed up processing. I got a warning with a 21-megapixel file first that Picasa would save my file as a downscaled version-76 percent the size of the original. (The latter, it turned out.)įor another, Picnik can handle images only up to 16 megapixels in size, which should be fine for most folks, but it isn't a limit on Picasa. And when the application says "Save to Picasa," I wondered whether that meant to my Web album or to my computer. And its interface is different from Picasa's while at the same time duplicating the same features-white balance and exposure, for example. For one, it takes some time to launch the Picnik module and to upload the photo. There are some awkward facets to the Picnik integration, though.
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