Thursday, January 7, 2010

Picasa Vs Windows Live Photo Gallery - A quick comparison

If you're someone who went out to choose between Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery, don't look further. Picasa is the clear winner. At this instant, there are not even comparable. Read ahead for more information.

User Interface - Intuitiveness and simplicity
    Live photo gallery is simple and easy. The UI is not much congested as Picasa; may be because of the less visible features of Live gallery. Gallery is easy to play with. Picasa's UI has more options with various view modes and sliders all around providing greater flexibility. If your priority is for simplicity, Live Gallery wins here. But if you prefer flexibility, Picasa is the one.

Face Recognition
    This is one place where Picasa rocks! Picasa has the easiest workflow (to assign the names for the detected faces in photos) available. As soon as the photos are added, Picasa scans them and groups them for you to name them. Each naming seems to improve Picasa's intelligence and face detection becomes more reliable and less error-prone. Live Gallery needs more manual activity to add people tags, making the workflow more cumbersome. Both the tools sometimes detects some part of the images as faces, while actually they are not. Live Gallery needs to improve a lot on this aspect.

Image Editing
    Again, Picasa is much better here. You will love the one touch abilities to fix your images and the ability to provide watermark or captions.

Sharing, Syncing, Email and Printing
    Both of them inherently supports their own photo sharing services online. Live Gallery supports adding Plug-ins too for sharing to other sites. Sync is much customizable and powerful operation in Picasa when compared to Live Gallery.

Export
    Picasa allows you to export photos in bulk to the desired quality and size while Live gallery just provides a rename and resize facility for single images. Just in case, if you ended having some raw images for conversion, Picasa does this job much easier. You can even export them with watermarks. Common raw formats are supported by default in Picasa. Windows Live Gallery asks us to install plug-in for this.

Multiple format support for image and video
    Well, this one may vary per user. Based on the formats that i had, Picasa handled all my videos and images without the need of any additional codec installs. Live Gallery did asked me to install additional plug-in.

Tagging
    Picasa has the leading edge here due to the availability of Quick tags and it seems to support all the standard tagging mechanisms like IPTC and EXIF.

Search
    They both performed good here since they all searched based on tags and file names and provided the results.

Additional Features
    Live Gallery provides the facility to make a blog post and to create a Data CD with the images. Picasa goes much further in this aspect with Blogging, Collage, Geo-Tagging, Places association, multiple-image Screensaver, Movie Creation, Poster creation and list goes on...

Conclude Now
    This comparison can go further covering more minute details which doesn’t seem to be necessary for inferring the result. Picasa provides much more flexibility and features in all those individual modules implemented when compared to Windows Live Gallery. Hopefully, we can expect more from Windows Live Gallery in the near future.

If you’re in the lookout for similar tools with comparable capabilities, search for iPhoto (Mac) and Adobe Lightroom.

5 comments:

  1. Very helpful! Thank you!

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  2. I would agree with you except for one things: WPG allows you to browse by tags, which for some bizarre reason Picasa does not allow (as far as I can find). Very frustrating!

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  3. Yes Henri, tag based browsing is not given much importance in the Picasa UI.

    What i usually do is to provide the tag name in the search box and it filters out the images for me.

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  4. What a terrible and useless little review. You clearly have no idea.

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  5. Picasa rocks!

    i'm having around 18000 snaps of total size 48GB and picasa manages them easily. they are all face tagged now along with the other tags. I started with both live gallery and picasa and ended up using picasa more. Live gallery seems to give importance to just tagging while picasa gives importance to all the other aspects too, to manage them.

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