Bad User Interface: A frustrating first experience with Google Picasa

Dec-11-05, 2:57 am by Hanford
File under: Google, Bad User Interface

My good friend Chad Spacey has told me a lot about Picasa. It's a photo thumbnail/organizer from Google. Kind of like Adobe Bridge, Adobe Photoshop Album, and my personal favorite ThumbsPlus.

But Picasa is from Google. And it's free. And it looks like it has some cool features. And I trust my friend Chad's opinion (he has great ideas). So I decided to give it a try. Once I got it working it seemed pretty cool (although I still prefer ThumbsPlus) but getting it working was another story.

Installing

After downloading and running the installer, my firewall detected it was attempting to "call home" before any dialog box appeared. I used my firewall to deny that request, becuase (1) I hadn't agreed to any sort of user agreement, and (2) I figured that since Picasa is a photo application that it wouldn't need to be connected to the Internet just for installing.

I was wrong. After I denied Picasa access to the Internet, I waited, and waited, and waited for the Installer to appear, to no avail. I got nothing. Not even a "You need to be connected to the Internet to install Picasa" dialog. Well, after what was at least sixty seconds, I decided to relaunch the Installer. This time I didn't deny it Internet access (hey, it's Google, nothing to fear, right?). Presto! I got the Installer interface right away.

First time use

After Picasa was installed, I launched it. After a brief delay, it launched and promptly asked me a question: Do I want my entire hard drive scanned for photos, or just my My Documents & My Photos.

Where was the "other" option? Where was the "none" option? If you were thinking the close button on the dialog would do it, you'd be wrong, becuase there was no close button on this dialog. I really didn't like either of their choices, since I was just testing Picasa out and didn't want to go through a lengthy scan process, and becuase my photos are not located in my My Documents folder, but it does contain a lot of Monolux game developement graphics and, uh, um, "educational" photos too. But my point is that either a "none" or a "other" choice would have worked for me.

I decided to choose the lesser of the two evils and go for the My Documents/My Photos option. My hope is that there would either be another dialog after this one before the scan begins that would allow me to abort or adjust things, or just abort the scan once I've left the dialog. And when I did leave the dialog I thought perhaps I had somehow managed to abort the scan.

But I was wrong. Perhaps 20 seconds later, images started popping up all over Picasa. And a little tiny popup appeared in the lower-right corner showing me all the images that were being scanned. Good news! The little window had a close button on it! I had found out how to stop the scanning! No, wrong again! Clicking the little close box only closed it for a brief second, then it would appear again with a new photo. I clicked it close several more times, but it continued to come back. That definitely qualified as bad user interface.

A panic insued as I raced to find the the stop-scan option, but I never did. I think it was at this point where I realized that I was allowing a program that insisted on being connected to the Internet to scan all the files on my computer. Not a good combination. I'm not paranoid of Google but it did make me wonder about things, and it did make me want to stop the scan. In fact, I can't remember what happened, but I ended up shutting Picasa down via the Task Manager, and at that time I noticed it was hogging up 224 megabytes. Photoshop, which was also running, was using just 11!

My final test

After giving up and coming to my senses, I relaunched Picasa again, and it continued to scan, but I decided to just let it run while I checked out the other features. Running it the second time went better but I never found the "stop scan" option. Picasa does look like a cool program with a lot of cool options for slideshows, tagging, and sorting. It would have been a much smoother experience if I wanted to just let it do it's thing, scan my drive, and be done. But it's agressiveness of a non-optional scan along with a popup that wouldn't stay closed really rubbed me the wrong way. I was hoping to find a good tool for using images in blogs, something that I call "imagequoting". But it appears as though Picasa only supports Blogger, so I'm going to shelve Picasa for now and continue to use ThumbsPlus for working with on-drive images.

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Fernando Madruga wrote: Oct-9-10, 6:53 pm

I was looking for an alternative image cataloging program, after trying for several times to install Photoshop Elements 9 Trial (even re-formated my PC!): after several failed attempts, I decided to look for free alternatives (Adobe's loss but they deserve it for making such a crappy installer).

Decided to try Picasa (having used it some years ago) and can't help but notice that, almost at the end of 2010, that is, almost 5 full years after this post, and the UI still suffers from the very same flaws... Amazing, to put it kindly...

Also, I noticed that, while I did "cancel" the scan by following the advice above, it still insisted on scanning my videos which I missed from the left "tree" pane! Back to the folder options and now I notice it's listed on the lower right-corner as "watched"; clicked that one and it opened the tree view up to where "My Videos" is. Again, a poor UI call: all 6 or so top level elements in the tree view, when collapsed, were showing a RED cross: no hint that somewhere deep under one of them was a folder that was being watched!

Surely those guys @ google aught to know better than this but what pains me more is this current trend towards "you are dumb and I, piece of crappy software, now better than you what YOU want!".

Another similar gripe is software installing in Portuguese just because my regional settings is Portuguese. I like all my s/w in English. Sometimes I have to hack MSIs or .INFs to "persuade" such dumb software to install in English when it would have been so easy to start with a language selection dialog. Heck, I woudn't even mind if the default on said language dialog was what they THINK that I want as long as I could choose what I REALLY want! In fact, when looking at several alternatives to do some task, I will drop those programs that don't even ask the language even before I install them and instead I go try something else.

ganjamanja wrote: Jan-29-08, 10:52 am

I found it:

in Picasa (even while it's scanning) go to Tools > Folder Manager
and set all folders to "Remove from Picasa"

now it isn't scanning and you can then, thru the folder manager, very quickly and easily set a few folders to "Scan Once" and others to "Scan Always" (ie. watch the folder for added pics).

pretty nice now that i found it, but while scanning there really should be an obvious "stop messing with stuff!" button somewhere!

ganjamanja wrote: Jan-29-08, 10:45 am

i agree, i find this page because Picasa is currently scanning my whole bloody harddrive, and external backup drive, and i can't stop the stupid thing. THere was no "Don't do anything just yet" option, allowing to to manually add the folders i need.

It does have very nice options as an organizer, way better than iPhoto, but the fact that i have to wait for it to add every single little thing resembling an image on all of 3 drives before i can go and delete the entire friggin' library and start over manually is pretty retarded. There is no "stop scanning" button ANYWHERE.

the integration with web albums will be incredibly useful, and the auto-scanning of selected folders via the Folder Manager is gonna be incredibly useful.

thinsoldier wrote: Nov-30-06, 7:52 pm

wow, look at the time!
This thing is _still scanning_
Seems like it's even including video clips for some reason

thinsoldier wrote: Nov-30-06, 3:27 pm

I was just about to make a blog post of my own making all the same points when I came across yours while googling for how to "stop scan".

I sort of like the interface but overall I hate the app for all the reasons you already state.

Hanford wrote: Mar-8-06, 12:08 pm

Re: the problem
I'll restate it: I didn't want it to scan, but it gave me no option to. I wanted to choose a specific sub-section of my computer to scan, but it gave me no option to. I wanted to stop a scan in-progress, but it gave me no option to. It frustrated me.

Re: Paranoia
When a user feels powerless over a piece of software, often times they panic. As I mentioned in my post, I "came to my senses".

Re: Gutter Images
I hinted at porn to add some humor to my entry, but the fact of the matter is that I have confidential work-releated images for multiple clients on my PC that I simply didn't want exposed in a program like that. And furthermore, what if multiple people use the PC? I surely don't want their images to show up in My Picasa view, and vice versa. In short, there's lots of logical reasons that are all g-rated to want to specifically target a sub-section of a computer.

TopCat wrote: Mar-8-06, 12:44 am

Don't understand what your problem is? If you press scan it will scan. If you don't want to scan don't press scan. Its really that simple. If your that paranoid about google, the internet etc then don't use them. If fact you might be better off not using a computer full stop. And if you were worried about the scan exposing images best left in the gutter where they belong then you got everything you deserved.

derek wrote: Jan-11-06, 7:31 am

annoyed with the scan thing too...scans every single damn pic

Chad Spacey wrote: Dec-13-05, 10:30 pm

Very interesting point of view. Most of my UI grips come after the whole install and scan process. I've noticed many programs have wanted internet access lately.

Humuhumu wrote: Dec-11-05, 12:14 pm

I think this experience is exactly why I'm starting to get paranoid about Google. That's creepy.

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