So I’ve been working with a range of Photo Album software to try to see which best suits my needs. Picasa suits my needs perfectly, except for the lack of an ability to (easily) add captions on a per-photo basis. I don’t caption all of my photos, but I’d like to caption a few of them to record extra detail, that I’d otherwise forget.

On the plus side, they have very good custom album export templates, which makes integration with an existing website easy. I’m working on a PERL script to read the file size, and capture date, and inject into the XML generated by a modified Picasa template. Which means my own website can easily parse this info. It all sounds good in theory!! Picasa definitely wins hands down when compare to other Album software. I was giving Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 extra weight, because of its iPod Photo synchronisation integration, but it still wasn’t enough!

On their forums, they’ve been very quiet about when v2.0 will be out .. it was due out last summer, bug since Google’s acquisition, that is no longer. There has been a few staff posts promising 2.0 soon, but as of yet, no firm date, quarter, or year! Per-photo captions has been acknowledged by staff, with promises of extended EXIF support as well. The big Picasa question remains, however, when will v2.0 be out!

(Update Dec 9th): Their forums have now moved to Google Groups.