Testing Picasa and Blogger/Hello

I'm a dedicated iPhoto user, but I also have an XP Box with a large volume of photos on it. So I downloaded Picasa and gave it a try. Then I tested the Picasa/Blogger integration. Here's the photo I chose, it's of our dog Molly about 15 years ago - in her once-upon-a-time favorite chair.



A few impressions of the combination of Picasa/Blogger and (even) Firefox.

• Picasa is very impressive. Unfortunately for OS X fans, it makes iPhoto look anemic. In particular, Picasa doesn't blink at handling a volume of photos that brings iPhoto to its knees. iPhoto is a spectacularly inefficient piece of software.
• The Picasa/Blogger integration still requires use of "Hello", an addin software that acts like a robotic blogger. It's better than in the days when one had to use Flickr as an intermediate store, but getting it all working is strictly for geeks. When I went to the Hello site for downloading one of their inline images was missing -- not a good sign!
• For geeks though, the Blogger integration works. I posted the above, then edited with the image displayed inline using the Blogger/Firefox "Compose" interface. It has a few bugs, but overall it's pretty impressive.

Points to Google. I hope Apple takes the competition to heart. iPhoto 5 is better than 4, but the performance issues are hard to get over.