Picasa 2.7 Comes with Improved RAW Support

Dan Kegel and Lei Zhang, Google Software Engineers, announced the release of Picasa 2.7 for Linux.

The new version is packed up with features like web album upload and download, localization in many languages, folder hierarchy views, better RAW support and more. Picasa for Linux is actually the Windows version, running through a modified version of Wine. Google contributed to Wine's development, by contracting with CodeWeavers to improve Wine to run Picasa 2.2 in a proper way. Google also asked some interns to work on some areas of Wine, such as widl, msi, riched20, etc.



The Picasa package is made up of the Picasa application, Wine and the web page rendering engine Gecko. If you want to use Picasa, you must have the following:

￭ a Intel 386-compatible CPU
￭ glibc 2.3 or greater
￭ a Linux kernel >= 2.6.13 (this is necessary only if you want to be notified of file changes; if you have a newer kernel and HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer - the new media you insert is automatically detected).
￭ To enjoy the Desktop Integration features, you must have a recent version of GNOME or KDE.
￭ Linux kernel >= 2.6.13, HAL >= 0.56, libgphoto2 and gnome-volume-manager or equivalent are required for camera detection and integration.
￭ To download from Picasa Web Albums, you will need a Mozilla-based browser.

So, what's actually new in Picasa 2.7? As I said earlier, you can download and upload images from and respectively to Picasa Web Albums, in a simple and easy manner. When you want to share some photos, let's say you took on a trip, you can post them online by using the new "Web Album" button. The albums can be downloaded directly into Picasa by using Firefox. The photo edits you do can be saved to disk, and you can revert to the original file, in case you do something wrong.



Thanks to the improved RAW support, you can work with RAW files from cameras like Canon 30D, Nikon D200, with Adobe DNG files and much more. The photo import from a camera to Picasa is much faster now. Larger thumbnails, better caption editing, ability to configure the row of buttons, a special "Starred Photos" album are only a few of the new features and improvements of Picasa 2.7.

There are still some problems that need to be fixed. Some of these issues have appeared now, with the 2.7 edition. You should know that it does not support movie files, and music playback during slideshows doesn't work.

Download Picasa 2.7 right now from Softpedia.