Devan Wanders

Listen to me wander.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Google deleted my memories

I've been a bit of a Google fanboy for the last couple years being quick to use most of their services and any software they acquire. When they bought Picasa I was really excited because it reminded me a lot of iPhoto on my Mac. I immediately started using it on my Windows machines at home and work.

Since the birth of our first daughter about 6 months ago we've really started taking a lot more pictures and videos. We got a Canon SD550 as a gift in anticipation of our new baby girl. With the addition of a 2Gig SD card it can take and store some really nice movies and is usually more easily accessible than our MiniDV camera. We found that Picasa imported the movie AVIs and played them as well as displaying the pictures. With version 2.5 of Picasa there is even a feature to publish movies to Google Video which we've tested.

Recently I've been noticing the disappearance of particular movies upon importing into Picasa and have been trying to troubleshoot it. My wife and I have been taking so may pictures and movies that I don't know how long this may have been happening.

Essentially Picasa is listing the correct number of items on the camera. However, when asking it to import all the items and delete only those items that are imported it fails to import some movies yet still deletes them. I haven't figured out the pattern of which movies don't get imported, but found this thread on the Picasa support Google Group.

Now going through my albums I'm starting to realize just how many movies did not get imported over the last few months. I feel stupid for not noticing this earlier, but the fact that some movies were getting imported made the problem hard to detect. So I'm pissed. Not only that, but I've recommended Picasa to others with my same Canon SD550 camera. I need to warn everybody I can about this potential problem and don't know if I'll ever feel comfortable using Picasa again.

Google, how could you release a product with such a destructive bug? Is the Canon SD line not common enough to have been tested? What are you going to do to regain my trust?