Picasa by Google

Google’s Picture service application Picasa provides the best way to catalogue and modify the pictures on your hard drives. Picasa is a free program that you simply have to download from Google. It is one of the simplest programs to use. When you first open the program it scans for photos found everywhere and anywhere in your hard drives. This is especially helpful for me, because I have older hard drives with backed-up files from my older computers. Picasa grabs it all, even DVD and CD cover art and video game art that you didn’t even realize you had.

After Picasa has found all your pictures, it categorizes them based on dates and where the files were found. The list of these files are in a left margin, which you can easily scroll through without disrupting your main frame. You can either keep the files in a flat folder structure, or a tree structure. I like the default flat way.When you select a folder, all of its pictures are displayed as extra large photo thumbnails. Double-clicking on a picture opens it in the same window but large and an editing menu shows up on the left. There are neat tools there from basic red eye fixes, cropping and retouching; to fine tuning and special effects such as light and shadows, and tints, glows and black and white effects. This is wonderful, and it’s all free, no need for Photoshop or Corel’s Paint shop.

In addition to all these fantastic things, Picasa provides a web album service to make photo sharing simple. When you have a picture or an album selected, all you have to do is click on share, or sync to web. You can then select emails from your contacts list(if you have Gmail), or write in people’s emails otherwise. Once a web album is created, you can then adjust the privacy settings to designate whether it’s open to the public, open only to the people you sent it to, or  have it completely blocked.

Picasa is really amazing, and I can’t believe that it’s free. I don’t have to go looking for files anymore, and if I want to know where they found a particular file or picture, I just have to right-click on it, and choose ‘locate on disk’. This opens the actual file.

Try out this program, you will love it. Again, Google does such a great job. Must be the way they treat their employees. Download it for free right here: http://picasa.google.ca/ 

~Darleya and Ashes~