Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

I'm a pretty big fan of Picasa to organize and mange the metadata of all the pictures I take. The software is lightening fast (even on my 7+ year old PC) and it has a pretty sensible keyboard shortcuts for most functions I use (notably adding captions and keywords). I also like that the software is very easy to use and mostly gets the feature set right for the amateur photographer (I've looked at some other product's whose feature set and UI were so complicated that it was impossible to know where to begin). Also, I am very big on the idea that it stores 99% of the metadata I enter in the photos themselves. This cuts down on the pain of switching to some other product in the future if I find it to be preferable. With that said, there is always room for improvement, so here is my list of what I would add to the product if I were its product manager.

Spell check

It would be most excellent if you could spell check captions and optionally your keywords. Keywords for me would be tricky since they contain a lot of proper names but I bet that Google could come up with some clever heuristic algorithm based on integration with its main index and Google desktop.

Identify photos without tags/captions

I'm in the middle of a big project to properly caption and tag every digital photograph that I have taken. It would be very helpful if Picasa could show me items that are missing captions and tags so that I can fill them in. Often I will skip a photo for tagging if I don't know who a person is or if I have to do some research on the location of where it was shot. This would be immensely helpful for me.

Better Tag handling
Tagging (or Keywords as it labeled in the UI) is pretty good, but I would like to see some improvements. I would like to easily see a list of all the tags that I have used in both alphabetical order and in terms of frequency of use. I would also like the ability to rename a tag easily across all my albums and folders. These features combined would make maintenance of the metadata much easier. A good case in point, you might notice that in some pictures, the photos are tagged "johnsmith" but in others they are tagged "johnnysmith". having good lists of all tags in use and the ability to rename would be a great boon to my organization schemes.

Control tag type-ahead list UI

Since I use tags a lot in Picasa, I really love its feature that offers type ahead for previously entered tags. This is wonderful most of the time, but it can be irritating based on how its implemented. It appears to show items that match the letters you've entered in the order that you've entered tags. So if I first tagged a photo with "normanjones" and then I tag a photo with "normamascolino" it will in perpetuity suggest "normanjones" when I type "norma". This is a pain because "normamascolino" is my mother and I have about a zillion times more photos of her than I do of "normanjones". It was just my bad luck to have tagged a photo containing him before I tagged a photo of my mother. I would like the ability to reorder the list of suggestions or at least have the tool offer type ahead suggestions heuristically based on the historical patterns of me using tags. Along the same lines, I would like to remove items from the suggestion list. Sometimes I have made typos in my keywords but Picasa still dutifully suggests the misspelled items to me.

SDK

It is a travesty that a tool that has so much of the customer's data in it doesn't offer some way to interact with it programmaticly. Some of these items I discuss in this list could be solved by the end user if Picasa offered a SDK.

Customizable keyboard shortcuts

This is a picky one for me because I tend to use the keyboard navigation for a lot of things in Picasa. This is vitally important for me because I have to go through so many pictures to add captions and tags. With that said, I've noticed that there are some cases where there is some keyboard shortcuts that I often trigger accidentally. I'd like to be able to either change the keyboard accelerators for these items or to disable that keystroke combination all together.

Google Apps for Domain account support

Lastly, I am a relatively new user of the Google Apps for Domains service so that I could get the GMail interface for a private domain that I own. It would be great if I could sign in with my account for this domain from within Picasa and use it as if it were a normal Google Account. Most notably I use the "e-mail this picture" functionality and would like to use my new domain's e-mail address as opposed to my @gmail.com address. I think this also applies to the Picasa web album support but I am not sure since I don't use that feature.