Picasa Photo Viewer is a nice software from Google and it is included as a part of Picasa 3 (Beta). Public beta was announced few days ago but unfortunately it’s only for the windows users. If you wonder whats new in this version here is a video by google about the new features.
Only thing that is missing in this video is new application included with Picasa called / Picasa Photo Viewer. it can be set as default image viewer application in windows and after all images will be opened in a nice & fast tool, without starting Picasa and long loading process + great interface etc. That’s something I was missing for a long time, since I moved to Linux. Picasa is great but it’s a photo manager not a viewer and importing images to library and only after accessing them is not for me.
As I really hate Eye of Gnome, default photo viewer of Gnome, and pretty much all the other available photo viewers on linux, since I think they are slow and ugly. So I’ve decided to make a hacking session, and try to port of Picasa photo viewer to linux. Some of you might know, that linux version of Picasa is just package with preconfigured Wine and slightly modified windows version of Picasa. I thought I could do the same trick to port Picasa photo viewer. Only thing I had to do was a wrapper script converting image path to a windows paths in a preconfigured wine. Well and few more tricks to configure wine and package all this as a “.deb” package. Result works surprisingly well on several different Ubuntu(7.10 ~ 8.10 alfa) installations on different machines. After installing a package you’ll find it in application ➥ graphics ➥ Picasa Photo Viewer. Unfortunately you need to make few manual steps to make it default image viewer cause I have not found any way to do automatically. Anyway if you want to use it by default you need to associate image mime types with it and easiest way to do so is to:
- Select any picture
- Right click on it & select open with other application
- Select “Use custom command”
- type
PicasaPhotoViewer
P.S.: You have to associate it with all picture mime-type’s you want to use it with (.jpg, .png, .raw …) After adding a custom command once you should be able to select it from a list in the ‘open with’
You can download a deb package form here. It requires wine >= 1.0.
Enjoy!!
Upload to the web album & edit with picasa won’t work unfortunately but I hope I’ll motivate google to make a proper port this way.
And finally that’s how it looks like:
