Picasa 2.7 for Linux

After about 4 months as a beta, the Google Photo blog carries the news that Picasa 2.7 for Linux is now out of beta and fully released.

The Linux download page carries the details of what is new in this release - with Picasa Web Albums integration being one prominent addition.  It also carries a list of known problems - where I notice one particularly worrying one which says that albums are uploaded to Picasa Web Albums as public, even if you don't select them to be so.

Photoshop for Linux

Picasa is a photo organizer, with a few photo adjustment tools.  However for real photo manipulation the program that defines the category is Photoshop.

To get Picasa working on Linux, Google use Wine - a layer that allows Windows applications to work on Linux.  Google have also extended their work (via hiring of CodeWeavers, Googlers working their normal jobs and in their 20% time, interns, and Summer Of Code students) so that Photoshop also works pretty well on Linux.

More details at the Google Open Source Blog and the Wine-Devel list.

Picasa 2.7 Beta for Linux

The current version of Picasa for Linux (version 2.2) has fallen behind the features offered on Windows, so a new beta has been provided that brings the Picasa for Linux version up to 2.7.

The step from 2.2 to 2.7 provides the following new features:

• Upload to Picasa Web Albums
• Saving edits back to disk if desired
• Folder hierarchy view
• Better RAW support

and of course plenty of other improvements to existing features.