Google’s Picasa Software and Gmail: Not Quite Great, But So Sticky

I started using Google’s Picasa 2 software because 1) I was looking for a way to do easy batch-viewing and -editing of photo image files, 2) it was recommended and 3) it’s free.

Results are mixed, though on balance I find Picasa useful as a supplement to Photoshop Elements 2 (which has limited batch-viewing and no batch-editing capabilities). Picasa makes it easy to select a group of images and apply simple corrections en masse, e.g., to create a virtual contact-sheet for film scans — very helpful. Picasa also makes it simple to categorize and search images, and to export or email them (resized appropriately, and automatically, according to easy-to-set user preferences). Its image-adjustment controls are rudimentary but well designed and effective. There is no way to remove dust spots, but Picasa is clearly intended for the casual digital photographer rather than the hobbyist film aficionado (who can always use Photoshop for specialized editing).

Picasa’s big flaw is that it has no provision for displaying the directory hierarchies on the user’s hard drive. Picasa’s file-library window shows only directories that contain images. The apparent idea is that the user will search for images by date, tag or label, so who needs hierarchy. Or maybe Google expects everyone to keep his images in the Windows-default “My Photos” or “My Pictures” directory. Or perhaps it’s a carryover from some Mac-centric view of things that has contempt for Windows-style directories (Picasa seems designed to compete with Apple’s iPhoto).

The problem is that I already have my own date-based categorization system, in which the images from each roll of film or digital photo session are stored in subdirectories under a higher-level directory that’s named according to the date the photos were made. For example, photos made April 12 are stored in subdirectories named “hi-res scans” and “edited versions”, in the directory “20050412”, which is itself located in the higher-level directory “2005”. I think my categorization system makes a lot of sense, since it’s much easier to manage than if I had to label every photo (there are thousands) or manually import it into an album (as in iPhoto). Dates correspond to events in my life and are usually the easiest points of reference when it comes to finding a particular image. Labeling is a nuisance, and would force me not only to create numerous categories but also to go back and add category labels to older photos every time I added a new category. Too much trouble. Only the lowest common denominator of labeling is going to work for me, and that means dates. But Picasa recognizes only the lowest-level directories in my hierarchy, so instead of displaying a simple hierarchy of directories in the form “\YYYY\YYYYMMDD-X”, which I can very quickly navigate and drill down into, I see a jumble of the identically named low-level subdirectories (“hi-res scans” and “edited versions”) that contain the actual image files. This is silly. There ought to be an option to view image files in conventional, Windows-style directory hierarchies. It’s an easy fix if Google decides to do it, and I hope that they will.

Other than these quibbles, Picasa is really quite good, and that’s partly due to its stickiness. What makes it sticky is its seamless integration with email, particularly Google’s Gmail service, and here Google was extremely clever. It understood how much utility could be gained by making it easier to email photos. Before Picasa, when I wanted to send a photo, I had to first open the photo in Photoshop, then edit it to reduce its size, then I had to save the edited file and remember where on my HD I saved it, then I had to create, address and title a new message using my email program, then I had to find the photo file on my HD and attach it to my email message before I could send it. With Picasa, I select a photo, click “Email”, click “Sign in” (for the first photo sent), specify an address and click “Send” — that’s it. This process works particularly well with Gmail because Gmail gives you a lot of storage space; you don’t have to worry about your email server filling up with bulky jpegs. My threshold for emailing photos is now much lower than it was previously.

When I started using Picasa it seemed like OK software, but then Incognito sent me a Gmail invite. Soon we were exchanging photos (and sending Gmail invitations to third parties), and I was using both Picasa and Gmail a lot more than I had initially intended. This is a winning system. Google stands to make a lot of money from it because of the context-sensitive ads it embeds in the emails, so I suspect they will continue to improve it.

Burchill on Thatcher

I have always loved Julie Burchill. There is nothing remotely like her mix of sentimental Bolshevism, working class cultural nostalgia, British patriotism and militarism, Judaeophilia, loathing of Germany and (usually) America, detestation of the British upper classes, personal libertinism combined with a hardnosed understanding of the consequences of such behavior, and her devotion to sixties-era British hipness and seventies punk rock. She is often wildly wrong, but always entertaining.

This recent piece on the upcoming UK election is nicely done. Ms. Burchill offers this beautiful passage about the impact of Margaret Thatcher, whom she depicts as a one-woman whirlwind of pent-up creative destruction:

[A]s some smart-aleck said, we must change or perish. And who should break our long postwar consensual slumber — not with a snog but with a short sharp smack around the head with a handbag and a cry of “Look smart!” — but the Iron Lady herself.

Mrs Thatcher meant, and still means, many things — some of which she is not yet aware of herself, as we are not. Only death brings proper perspective to the triumphs and failures of a political career; it is only with the blank look and full stop of death that that old truism “all political careers end in failure” stops being true. Only a terminally smug liberal would still write her off as an uptight bundle of Little Englandisms, seeking to preserve the old order, however hard she worked that look at first; voting for her was something akin to buying what one thought was a Vera Lynn record, getting it home and finding a Sex Pistols single inside.

She was just as much about revolution as reaction, and part of any revolution is destruction. Some of the things she destroyed seemed like a shame at the time, such as the old industries — though on balance, isn’t there anything good about the fact that thousands of young men who once simply because of who their fathers were would have been condemned to a life spent underground in the darkness, and an early death coughing up bits of lung, now won’t be? It’s interesting to note that while some middle and even upper-class people choose to go into “low” jobs — journalist, actor, sportsman, plumber — which pay well and/or are a good laugh, no one ever went out of their way to become a miner. “Dogs are bred to retrieve birds and Welshman to go down mines,” said some vile old-school Tory; not any more they’re not, thanks to Mrs T.

Her appetite for destruction was more often than not spot-on. Mrs Thatcher was hated by the old Tory establishment because she, more than any Labour leader, brought down the culture of deference, of knowing one’s place. This led to the very British cultural social comedy of left-wing poshos such as the Foots being outraged by the upstart, while outsiders who should on paper have been Labour voters recognised her as one of them.

One of my younger friends, a very angry, talented, Anglo-Punjabi man of profoundly working-class origin, remembers as a child crying inconsolably for days when Mrs Thatcher was unseated by her own party. It says it all that the Queen far preferred the company of the Labour Prime Ministers Wilson and Callaghan than she did the Conservative Thatcher; the Queen could smell the lack of respect on Mrs T, and it put her back up no end.

As to the current election, Ms. B. sees no hope of a “Mad Outsider” candidate akin to Thatcher. It won’t be Blair:

How weird is Blair? Not weird enough for me, though obviously too weird for some. I shall vote for him because he has banned foxhunting, and because he took us into a just war against a vile dictatorship; I’d be hoping for a few more of those during the next term, which I suppose makes me one weird woman voter, obsessed as we are meant to be with peace, childcare and fluffy bunnies. On the other hand, I find the current Labour cultural cringe towards Islam — to “make up” for the war, as if Saddam Hussein hadn’t single-handedly been responsible for the deaths of more Muslim people than the entire British and American armed forces put together! — extremely offensive, as a woman.

Hoping for a few more of those! I doubt it. Tony has had a political near-death experience as it is. But the sentiment is appreciated.

Saigon: 30

The Vietnamese communists won their long, hard, cruel, bloody war thirty years ago today. The United States suffered its most humiliating defeat. Hundreds of thousands of Americans had fought, and tens of thousands of Americans had died, for a failed cause. These Americans had been ordered to kill, and they had killed millions in that same failed cause. They had been betrayed by their government and their commanders and by the people who supported their enemies, and by those who shunned them or despised them upon their return.

The Cold War, a real war, a war we could have lost, was at its nadir.

I remember the day. I was 12. My mother cried. The American leftists on TV cheered and put their fists in the air. They were smug. This was their victory, too.

The fall of Saigon is not an event in the distant past. It is not yet history. It was yesterday. It is part of now.

I tried repeatedly over the last few days to type up a coherent and thoughtful and analytic post on this topic. But after three tries I am giving up. All I do is type an angry rambling rant and elevate my pulse rate.

It is bad to hate. But as I contemplate this day, and what it meant, and how and why it happened, and those who want it to happen again, that is the only emotion I feel.

“Trust is not a calculation”

I agree with Jeff Jarvis on this point. I wrote the following in a comment to Jeff’s post:

The “don’t be evil” slogan is either naive or disingenuous on Google’s part, because it’s based on a presumption that concentrated power can be managed by good intentions. Historically this proposition has rarely if ever been true. What really keeps power in check is accountability based on competition and openness. Google has competitors but the essence of Google’s position on openness is, “trust us.”

This is also the problem with Google’s TrustRank scheme. Rather than merely evaluate the trustworthiness of news providers on a case-by-case basis, as we do now, under TrustRank customers would also have to evaluate Google’s judgment in deciding which news sources are trustworthy. This might make sense for customers who share Google management’s biases but for everyone else it’s a burden.

Google is a network company par excellence. It knows how to add value by maximizing network opportunities for content providers. Where Google stumbles is in trying to add value by providing or managing content according to its own values hierarchy.

From what I can infer, Google’s TrustRank system is mainly a branding scheme — in this case, the brand is based on an automated method for vetting content according to Google management’s preferences. It sounds like NPR without the overhead. There’s nothing wrong with that but it isn’t special either. All news aggregators impose their biases to some extent, because they have to decide what’s news and what isn’t. Google’s proposal, if it is what it appears to be, amounts to another aggregation scheme, but one overlain with hubris about what used to be called “scientific methods” — i.e., the idea that by mechanizing selection rules one can remove human bias. It will be interesting to see what emerges — if Google actually implements the TrustRank concept — and how it fares in the marketplace.

UPDATE: Read Tim Oren’s comment on Jeff’s post for another view.

UPDATE2: Tim Oren’s second comment adds more reasons to be skeptical about the validity of my concerns.

C-SPAN 1 & 2 (times e.t.)

Book TV Schedule. After Words and Q&A. On C-SPAN 1, Lamb Q[uestions] & Charles Krauthammer A[nswers] (8:00 p.m. and again 11:00). (Krauthammer is, of course, the speaker of the “Quote of the Day” Lex put up Friday. Krauthammer, originally trained as a psychiatrist,

writes a syndicated column for the Washington Post that appears in over 150 newspapers worldwide. He is also a monthly essayist for TIME magazine, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, a political analyst for FOX News and a weekly panelist on Inside Washington. He coined and developed The Reagan Doctrine (TIME, April 1985), defined the structure of the post-Cold War world in The Unipolar Moment (Foreign Affairs, 1990/1991), and outlined the principles of post-9/11 American foreign policy in his much-debated Irving Kristol Lecture, Democratic Realism (AEI Press, March 2004).

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