Picasa 2.5 new features

Although it's still not rolling out automatically, the golden version of Picasa 2.5 is available for direct download.

This version of Picasa offers an extensive range of new features, compared to the previous 2.2 version. These include:

• Picasa Web Albums for easy sharing on the web.
• Nested Folder View - a much requested alternative way to look at the photos on your disk
• Save Changes to Disk - for the times when you do want to overwrite original images with edited versions
• Improved import - both faster, and into existing folders
• Updated screensaver with more presentation options
• Geotagging using Google Earth to indicate where each photo relates to, and the ability to export as KML for display in Google Earth and Google Maps
• Larger thumbnails
• More RAW support, including newer cameras, DNG, more accurate color, and faster
• Improved caption editing
• Starred photos organize automatically into a special album
• "Just raw frames" option lets you export time-lapse sequences in the movie maker
• The bottom row of buttons can now be configured to suit your needs

and

• an Experimental menu for some other things they're trying out.

 

There's more detail on many of these via the release notes.

 

For Picasa Web Albums, there's a new tutorial online.  Within Picasa itself, the Web Albums button pulses to draw attention to itself, and on pressing it you are presented with a "New Feature!" dialog, that leads through to the online tutorial, as well as giving you options to sign up for the albums.

The online support pages do mention the Web Albums, but it looks as if there is still work to do here to fully document all the other new features.