Photo Collections - Using Picasa
Years ago, when I worked for Ritz Camera, Picasa was included on the CD's we made for customers. Since then it has been purchased by Google and is freely available by itself or as part of the Google Pack. It is certainly one of the best and easiest of the image management tools out there.
Picasa's Basic Functions
Picasa will scan your My Pictures folder and any others that you specify. It also monitors for new additions and automatically adds new items when it starts up. You can further organize your pictures using Albums, grouping them together by subject no matter where they're located on your hard drive. Picasa also supports Keyword tagging and multiple Keywords for each picture. Even without creating an album you can easily find all your Flower pictures or Billy's Birthday pictures simply by using a Keyword search.
On the bottom of the screen are quick links to Google Web Albums, Email, Print to your printer, Print to Online services, Blogger and Export. The ones I use the most are Email and Blogger. It's nice to be able to post an image and some text directly to my blogs. Since Google owns Blogger and Picasa it makes sense to have this function. The order prints button will post a group of selected images to Shutterfly, Snapfish, RitzPix, Walgreens, CVS and more. It even connects to PhotoStamps so you can print actual postage from your photos. How cool is that?
Picasa Features
Some of the enhanced features include:
- Common editing features like cropping, color, contrast, redeye fix, B&W conversion etc. ALL edits don't actually modify your original files and can always be undone.
- Export to HTML for building web galleries.
- Burn to CD for slideshow or backup (can include Picasa on the disc)
- Easy upload to Google Web Albums and other photo sharing / printing sites.
- Direct attachment to emails.
- Good printing capabilities including multiple pictures per page
- Can download images from your camera (called Import)
Picasa is one of the more robust image management applications, containing almost every function the average digital photographer needs. Best of all it's free! If you're not happy with the software that came with your camera then certainly give Picasa a try. It may be just what you're looking for.
Grab a copy from the link on the left; it's part of the Google Pack. Give it a whirl. I'd highly recommend that you download the User Guide also.
I'm not connected with Picasa or Google. Just a satisfied user of a fine piece of free photo editing software.
