May '07 Tools

Picasa is a FREE application from Google that will allow you to easily organize, find, edit and share all the digital images on your computer. It is amazingly fast, efficient and user friendly. Picasa will quickly revolutionize the way you manage your digital photos.

Once installed, Picasa automatically scans your computer, locates and organizes all your images and sorts them into virtual folders organized by name, size, or date.

Picasa works with JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD, and movie files and is compatible with most digital cameras. It also detects your USB driver and imports pictures into albums. It's a snap to reorganize your images - just drag and drop to arrange your folders and make albums to create new groups.

Picasa has a search bar that is always visible and searches are live - meaning the displayed images are filtered as you are typing your search terms. When a word is typed into the search bar, an image is displayed if that word is all or part of a keyword, or part of the file name. If the searched word is part of a folder name, all images in that folder will display.

Picasa makes photo editing simple with one-click fixes as well as powerful effects including color enhancement, red eye reduction and cropping. You can create slide shows set to your MP3s. Images can also be prepared for needs such as emailing or printing, by reducing the image file size and setting up page layouts.

Because Picasa was designed to be non-destructive to your original image files, it can't overwrite changes to your original files. To save changes you have made to your photos, you will need to use the export option which will create an edited JPG version of the original image. In Picasa 2, a new feature has been added which will allow you to save changes overwriting the actual picture file. However, a backup version of the original image is made and saved in a hidden folder named "Originals", which is located in the same folder as the original image.

You can make note of your favorite photos using labels and stars and also write captions for your images. If you want to make backups, or give someone a copy of your favorite photos, Picasa makes instant backups to CD or to other drives.

What else can you do with Picasa? You can set an image as your desktop background, create a collage or a poster, create a movie, order prints online from over a dozen different vendors, and post photos on Blogger and Picasa Web Albums.

Want to share your photos with a wider audience... maybe your friends, family, or even clients? Picasa Web Albums is a FREE photo-sharing web application that allows users with accounts at Google to store and share up to 1 GB of photos for free. If additional space is needed, you can purchase an upgrade to your account. No ads are shown on Picasa Web Albums, in either free or paid accounts.

You can download Picasa at http://picasa.google.com/download/index.html