The thought of losing your photos is a nightmare and I was recently reminded of the importance of keeping an up-to-date working backup when, after some distinctly odd behaviour, my c:\ drive went down. Thanks to the excellent Live Mesh I had current copies of all my ongoing work files distributed around my network, and online too, in case the house/office burnt down. So that just left my photos…

If anything I’m even more paranoid about losing my photo collection, so I had full backups of all my original files and I use the free Google Picasa to organise them, so it was simple to download a copy of the latest version (Picasa 3.8 has just been released). However, faced with the need to restore, it hit me that a collection is far more than just the original photos and the management software – it’s also all the organisational information that makes the photos meaningful and accessible.

Now this wasn’t an entirely new thought, and nor was its significance for backup. One of the major reasons I had switched from Photoshop Elements to Picasa for organising my images was that I had grown suspicious of Elements’ all-your-eggs-in-one-basket approach, based on a central all-important catalogue that becomes larger and larger and so more and more vulnerable, as well as harder but more important to backup. It was a point that had hit home when my father’s Elements’ catalogue became corrupted and he was left scrabbling for his most recent backup disks.

By contrast Picasa takes a much more distributed approach. Rather than laboriously tagging every image as Elements expects, for example, you can name your folder with the date, people and event and then live search on these (plus embedded metadata, image caption, description etc). The folder-based approach isn’t as precise, but it’s far quicker to apply and surprisingly effective for retrieval. Moreover, because it’s more distributed, it’s also more robust – I knew that this core folder-based organisation would be recovered with the embedded metadata.

But what about the other organisation?  Suddenly I thought about all the work that you do in Picasa: creating albums, reordering, starring and rotating images, applying non-destructive edits and managing Picasa’s brilliant face tags. Clearly this information must be handled in a central database somewhere and presumably I had now lost it.

I needn’t have worried. Picasa does indeed have a central database, but it also cleverly distributes the information it needs to rebuild its database as hidden .picasa.ini files within each folder. Each ini file is a simple text file containing unsaved information on edits, stars and even the placement and identification of faces.

It meant that all I had to do was leave Picasa on overnight and, when I came in in the morning, Picasa had recreated its database and everything was up and running  as it had been before the crash. The only sign that this was a fresh set-up was that my name tags (some 10,000 spread across around 50 people) were now unnamed.  I named the first couple manually and then spotted something about logging in to web albums, which I did, and Picasa automatically named all the rest.

Belt and Braces Backup

I was more than happy with this, but it turns out that not quite all the information is stored in the picasa.ini files as, for some reason, these don’t store data for albums or image reordering.  To back this information up you must use Picasa’s Tools > Backup Pictures command.

With its prominent Burn button I had always assumed that this was intended solely for backing up to CD/DVD and, with 70GB of images, the thought had always been too awful to contemplate compared to the simplicity of drive-to-drive backup. In fact, digging in the Help file, I discovered that it’s perfectly possible to backup drive-to-drive, you just have to create a new Backup Set and the option becomes available. Although I’ll probably still stick to distributed folders rather than centrally-managed albums, I will certainly use this approach in future as all photos in the backup set are still simply stored in their folder structure (complete with ini files), but it makes it much easier to update only new and changed files.

Also while digging in the Help file, I came across some other important information. Another of Picasa’s great advantages is that it comes with 1GB of free web space for sharing web albums; what I hadn’t realised is that Google had radically cut its price on additional storage. With 80GB now costing only $20 a year (compared to $150 previously), and the ability to automatically synchronise original and changed files directly from Picasa, I’ve signed up and plan to add a Mesh-style online backup to my local backups.

Between its distributed database handling, disk-to-disk backup and bargain online storage, Picasa really does cover all bases and offers an excellent way to keep your images organised and safe.

This adds a few  features across the board, such as a revamp of importing and various interface tweaks, but the clear focus of the new release is on in-depth tagging of images via a new side panel that offers three tabs for applying text-based tags, locational geodata and new face-based tags.

To be honest my heart sank when I heard this – what I’ve always liked about Picasa is that it keeps things simple and doesn’t treat managing your photos as a full-time job. Moreover I’d recently come away less than impressed with Photoshop Elements 8’s new face tagging not so much because the technology doesn’t work (it does though imperfectly), but rather because the gains aren’t worth the effort.

So how does the new Picasa 3.5 shape up?

Brilliantly.

I’m still too lazy to be a huge fan of intensive text-based meta tagging but Picasa clearly needed to improve its feeble floating Keywords panel and the Tags panel certainly does that. Likewise I don’t suppose many users ever bothered to geotag their their images via Google Earth, but now you can simply call up a Google Map in the Places panel and drag-and-drop your images onto it. Excellent.

The real revelation though is face tagging. Select a folder or album and Picasa does a great job of pulling out the faces in your images – or at least all those looking at the camera – and listing them in the People tab with an “add a name” label next to them. I half-heartedly marked up a few photos of family members while idly thinking how nice it would be to have a week off to go through my entire collection of thousands of images like this…

But then I noticed that Picasa 3.5 had added a new People category to the main navigation panel down the left of the screen. I clicked on the “me” tag and discovered that, based on just one image that I had tagged (with comedy glasses), Picasa had found another 17 images that it was confident was me and another 160 or so that it thought was me. Incredibly all of them were, including many in bad hats and blonde wig (don’t ask). Confirm these suggestions and Picasa goes and finds some more, and then more again and all with astonishing accuracy. I generally don’t like having my photo taken (and it’s my camera) so the fact that  Picasa has found over 300 shots of me without a single mistake is remarkable – and more than enough.

It was a similar story with other clearly-defined adult faces, but accuracy with my five-year old twins (non-identical) was unsurprisingly far more hit-and-miss though I think this might well have been because I didn’t bother finding clear images to tag originally (and because I can never get Robbie to look at the camera).

In any case it really didn’t matter because it’s incredibly simple to select the incorrect suggestions and drag them to the right tag. In fact the whole process is actively enjoyable.

That’s something I never thought I’d be able to say about the prospect of tagging thousands of images containing even more faces.

Ultimately human nature means that most people are most interested in pictures of people, and especially pictures of themselves and their friends and family. With another brilliant search technology under its belt – bitmap-based faces – Google makes a previously unthinkable chore into a real joy. Superb.

And did I mention that it’s free?

That can be the only explanation for the events of the past couple of days. First the company announced one of the most audacious moves I’ve ever seen with the Google Chrome Frame.

Not content with having its own browser, Google now wants to hijack Microsoft’s as well. Google Chrome Frame is an IE plug-in that replaces the IE rendering engine with the WebKit engine that underpins Chrome. Why? Because like the boy racers that hang around the McDonalds car park in my local town centre, Google wants to show off that it has the fastest engine.

Is this, as Google claims, an altruistic attempt to allow IE users “to seamlessly enjoy modern web apps at blazing speeds, through the familiar interface of the version of IE that they are currently using”? Pull the other one. The type of person who installs a new rendering engine in their web browser is the type of person who’s more than capable of downloading and installing Google Chrome for themselves.

Coupled with the fact that web developers need to add a line of code to their sites to make IE run the Chrome engine, and you can pretty much guarantee that this is going to be the nichest of niche features. Google Chrome Frame is nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt, designed to make Internet Explorer look bad and drive uptake of Chrome.

Another sign of Google’s anti-Microsoft agenda arrived with the launch of Picasa 3 yesterday (the most minor of updates, conveniently timed to coincide with the launch of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 – remember kids, do no evil). I installed Picasa 3 to take a poke around the new features yesterday, and then got a bit of a shock when I fired up Internet Explorer 8 later that evening.

A pop-up box appeared the moment I fired up the browser, telling me that “an [unnamed] application you installed wants to change your default search engine”.  I’ll leave you to figure out what search engine it wanted to change it to.

Google already has a monopoly-sized share of the search market – does it really need to sully the otherwise excellent Picasa with such dirty tricks? Or is it really just trying to pi** Microsoft off, after all?