I hope it can be useful

Love it-----great free service on GOOGLE S
Very easy to use--lots fun--- great options with ease

I am an avid Googler and an individual who has always been fascinated with Google's business model and product development. When Google's Picasa came out as is with most of their products I had to check it out and see what it was all about.

I ended up adopting it as my primary photo hosting solution out of the shear desire to keep as much of my digital life under one proverbial roof. If you are not as rigid in this desire I highly recommend that you give the Picasa development team more time because some of the glitches and pains I have had to work through with regard to this service have been ongoing and very time consuming to put it mildly.

Problem #1
When synchronizing my web album with their Picasa desktop application I often find web albums duplicated. The major issue with this falls in the fact that there is no multiple album deletion capability so in order to fix this you literally have to log into your web account and delete the duplicate albums one at a time. When a hundred or more albums get duplicated this can take hours!

Problem #2
Because of the synchronization issue I ran into under problem #1 I began looking for an alternative way to keep my local directories in sync with my Picasa web albums. I tried out Gladinet Cloud Desktop (see my review on SiteJabber) which offers this very service.

What a nightmare! First Gladinet ended up creating hundreds of empty web albums with long binary titles during it's synchronization process with my Picasa web account. (remember the only way to delete an unwanted album is one at a time). Luckily the Picasa desktop software has a feature "Delete empty online web albums" that fixed this for me.

Note: when I used this option a window popped up to confirm I wanted to delete these few hundred albums but I could not hit the "yes" button because the window was so large it pushed the "yes" and "no" commands off the screen and the window was not adjustable. (If you ever find yourself in this situation click on the window, hit "tab" twice and hit the space bar. That will select the not visible "yes" button.

Problem #3
Not so much a problem as it is an inconvenience Google Picasa only allows folders one level deep for organizing. As an individual who loves to sub-categorize this is a hard limitation to work with.

Problem #4
The overall design of their desktop software and their online albums is not as user friendly or forgiving to customization as it could be. One thing that drives my bananas is that I can't default web albums to "show all" at log in. Ever single time I have to click the button. After every album you navigate into you have to once again hit the button. Very annoying.

Also, the sync to web buttons never seem to permanently stay in the "on" position, every so often I have to turn them on again. (Perhaps this is what causes album duplication). Just wish this wasn't so buggy.

In either case I will keep working with the software as it is improved but I can't as of yet recommend this site site or their desktop software for a novice user as I feel it could really add a lot of frustration to their life.