Picasa no worky

I've used Picasa for a couple years now, and I still don't get it. Here's my workflow:

1. Take pictures with camera.
2. Stick SD card from camera into computer.
3. Import pictures from SD card to home fileserver.
4. Browse, edit, remove red-eye, torture relatives with more pictures of kids, etc.

But here's where it breaks down. At step 3, Picasa asks me where I want to save the pictures. I must type a directory name; it won't store them in the root of the directory specified in Picasa preferences. So in effect, I must supply metadata to describe my new pictures, and I always end up typing "pictures I took in the last few days" or more likely "asdfasdsdfs."

Can you imagine how successful Gmail would have been if it popped up a dialog forcing you to type a label name each time a new email came in? Or even worse, a single mandatory label to cover all email that had arrived in the last 24 hours?

Picasa, it's your job to organize my pictures for me. Don't make me do it for you!

This wouldn't be such a problem if I could type the nonsense directory name, do the import, and then immediately see what I imported. But no, Picasa doesn't know about pictures it's imported until it re-scans watched directories. This means it can be minutes after the import before I actually get to see my pictures. By then I've usually switched to another task (like writing a griping blog post about my photo-management software) and I forget to return to it.

It's possible I've totally missed the Zen of Picasa. Perhaps because it came from Google I expect it to act like other Google products: it should be a giant funnel for unorganized data, and it should magically present that data in a sensible fashion. Instead, Picasa refuses to accept unorganized data, and it briefly (but at a critical time) loses all knowledge of the newest data I've entrusted to it. I don't get it.