Now that Google has purchased Picnik, presumably to try to better contest Flickr in the online photo sharing market, I’m hoping they take a huge step to offer something Flickr can’t come close to. They already offer amazing photo organization at home (Flickr doesn’t), but it’s not quite where it needs to be yet…

I absolutely love Picasa for the desktop. If you haven’t checked out its ability to do things like facial recognition, geotagging, nametags, etc you are in for a pleasant surprise. The one hangup for me is that there still isn’t a Picasa server I can run at home. We keep all of our photos on a NAS drive, which means that we have to install Picasa on every computer in the house in order to catalog them on each machine. And if I run facial recognition on one machine, those results don’t show up on another. What I’d really like to do is serve up the Picasa database  (not just the photos themselves) to any client machine on my network. With all the work Google is doing to empower the cloud, I’m hoping the next step for them is to help empower my local cloud (fog?).

I did find this solution, which looks like a pretty decent workaround, but I want the real thing. Maybe even add some accounts that let different users on my network comment and rate photos? Some accounts can edit, some can only view? Basically, I want to be able to do anything I can do on the web on a local server. Still, not complaining about this amazing (and free) software.