Picasa

A couple days ago, Google announced a port of their photo viewer, Picasa for Linux. The interesting part about this particular port is that it isn't a native port, but the Windows version working under a patched version of Wine. For those of you fellow Linux users, Picasa for Linux works amazingly well (especially when compared to other programs under Wine). Since it ships with its own copy of wine, the download is a bit big (~26M w/ an installer). The installer version installs to a users home directory or /usr/bin if its run as root, or you can opt to use an rpm or deb if your distribution prefers. The installer works like most others, you make it executable with chmod a+x picasa*.bin and run it. The installer managed to put links in my Gnome menus which surprised me. The program its self is almost identical to the Windows version, though some desktop integration features are controlled by scripts in whatever directory it installed to. I pointed it at my picture folder and over the course of about 20 minutes it seems to have found all my pictures (~18G of jpegs and NEFs). The dates aren't correct on all of them though. I was particularly pleased that picasa can handle my Nikon RAW files (.nef) as well as many other RAW formats. I have been wanting a tool that can generate thumbnails of RAWs for quite awhile. The only downside that I have found is that picasa is a bit hard on the system (100% cpu usage if you are doing much of anything).

Google was even nice enough to give its patches back to the Wine project, so hopefully we will see some improvements in Wine soon as well.

If you use Linux and a camera, I would give picasa a try (good for Windows users too), though it is still an early release it is very useful.

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