A home for your photos

Google doesn't do tag lines - even the famous "Don't be evil" is described as an informal company motto, and is hidden away in the code of conduct on subsidiary sites such as the investor website, not on the regular search site.

Picasa is slightly different from the Google norm - after all it was a brand that Google acquired fully formed, and have retained since.

The name Picasa is rationalized as being form from Pic (=picture/photo) and Casa (=home), hence "a home for your photos".  This has been explained this way for many years, but the only direct quote I can find for now is from this year, by Adrian Graham, product manager for Picasa.  (Via the Internet Archive, a view of the Picasa home page from Nov 2002 is rather sparse, since the images were not archived, but the page title is "Picasa: The best home for your pictures").

The current Picasa home page now uses the tagline "Picture Simplicity".

Along the way, Picasa has also used the following taglines:

• Picasa -- The software that should have come with your digital camera
• Hello -- Share pictures like you're sitting side-by-side

The first of these is echoed by the text of buttons to be found in Google's referrals program, which uses the text:

• Get photo software from Google
• Organise your pictures. Get Google's photo software.
• Google's photo software. It's what should've come with your camera.

Different countries have different buttons, and the US seems to have been updated with some changed text, which emphasises the sharing aspects of Picasa - presumably to accompany the roll out of Picasa 2.5 with many more options for sharing in it:

• Organize and share photos with friends. Google' photo organizer.
• Organize your digital pics with Google's photo software.

Note that none of these referral links actually make any mention of Picasa - they all talk about "Google's photo software".  Referral buttons are also available in languages other than English, and as far as I can tell, these are fairly literal translations of the same phrases used on the English versions.

The Picasa Review Guide sums up the program with the phrase "Find and enjoy all the photos on your computer in seconds".

Update 30/9/06: John Battelle's article Thoughts on Picasa and Google's Marketing Strategy carries a image with another Picasa advertising phrase: You can find any image you want on the web. How about on your own computer?