14 DAY TRIAL // Picasa, the photo sharing and organizing service from Google, hasn't been a Flickr killer, but then again it wasn't intended to be. It has grown quite a bit and has been adopted by a lot of people looking for an easy way to post and manage photos online, and the search giant continues to improve the service as it has just announced some major adjustments in the speed of the online component Picasa Web Albums.
Picasa comes with a client, a desktop application, which makes it easy to organize, sort, view and even brush up your photos but the most important part is the online service, which lets you upload your albums as well as share them with others. Google has been working to make the two come together seamlessly but it still has a long way to go.
Some differences come from the features lacking in the online service but those can be fixed in time. The trickier problem is the speed difference as web applications are much slower than the ones running natively inside the OS. Google has been pushing the industry into adopting standards, like the HTML 5, that will make web apps run faster and has even launched its own browser, Chrome, to address some of the problems.
In the meantime, it is also working on making its web applications faster and the latest case is Picasa. The developers were having a dilemma. On the one hand they wanted the photos online to be as big as possible especially when using the slideshow feature of the full-screen view. On the other hand they wanted Picasa to be as fast as possible and using larger pictures meant slower response. One way of solving this was to use smaller pictures but that meant a lower quality. They chose the harder way, namely rewriting some of the code and optimizing it whenever possible. And the results are clearly visible as going to the next picture even in full-screen view is almost instantaneous if you have an Internet connection that can keep up.