Picasa 3 for Windows
Friday, December 18th, 2009 | Author: admin
Picasa is a free photo organization and editing tool from Google, and for a free program, it really has a lot to offer. Picasa is desktop software that runs on Windows, and it can be downloaded from http://picasa.google.com/.

Find Your Photos

After you install Picasa, it asks you if you’d like to scan your entire computer or if you’d like to scan just the desktop, my photos, and my documents folders. I’d really suggest restricting your search to just those folders, unless you’ve got more than one hard drive or you’ve been storing photos in odd locations.When Picasa scans your entire computer, you’ll get cached Internet files, graphics from computer programs, and other images that you probably don’t need in your photo album. You can remove files later, but it’s easier not to import them in the first place.

You can also import photos directly from a digital camera, which is a handy way to keep them organized from the start.

Organize Your Photos

Picasa 3Photos by Marziah Karch
Picasa will organize your photos by date and initially retains the same file structure as your hard drive. The main area shows thumbnails of the images, and along the right side is a scroll bar to navigate. Thumbnails in the library are grouped by folder, but they’re all displayed (with some scrolling.) This means that you don’t have to repeatedly click to navigate to a new folder, which is a nice touch.You can move thumbnails from folder to folder directly from Picasa, and it will confirm and then move the corresponding file on your hard drive. This makes it much easier to organize albums.

Labels and Stars

Rather than physically moving all your photos, you can give them labels. That way, for example, you could label all the photos of your children with their name but still have individual folders for vacations and holidays.Similarly, you can rate your photos with stars and view only the photos with a certain rating. This makes it easy to tell by thumbnail which photos are in focus or have the best expressions.

You can also geotag photos with the geographic location they were taken. This lets you view the photos geographically in Google Earth.

Edit and Fix

Picasa 3
By double clicking on a photo, you can enter an editing room to crop, fix red eye, straighten photos, adjust color, and apply special effects like film grain or soft focus. The editing room even has an I’m Feeling Lucky button, just like the Google search engine, which automatically applies recommended effects.Overall, the effects are pretty advanced for a free software program. You don’t get as much control as you would in an advanced photo-editing package like Adobe Photoshop, of course, but the options and controls for photo editing are still really nice.

Printing and Digital Scrapbooking

You can select a photo or a range of photos and print them from your computer. You can format the photos as standard sizes, like 8×10 or 5×7, and you can print multiple pictures on the same page.You can also create a collage of photos. In Picasa 3, you can even rearrange the photos in a collage and add captions. This doesn’t give you the same options as dedicated digital scrapbook programs, but it’s still a nice, easy option.

If you’d rather order prints, you can press a button to order prints online from multiple printing services, such as Snapfish, Shutterfly, or Kodak.

Share

Picasa 3Screen Capture
This is another area where Picasa has a lot of options. You can select photos and email them as attachments. You can post photos directly to your Blogger account. Picasa resizes the photos for the web for this, if you wish.Picasa lets you make your own gift CD slide shows with your pictures and a copy of Picasa. You can also make a backup CD or DVD of your photos for archiving.

YouTube

Picasa 3 has added a lot of features that tie in with video. This works really well for people who own a digital video camera or occasionally shoot small video clips on their digital camera.

You can manage video clips in Picasa and do some minor editing, like setting an in and out point and writing captions. You can then upload the movie to YouTube with the push of a button.

You can also make easy slide shows with text captions, transitions, and audio backgrounds. Export the finished movie or upload it to YouTube from Picasa.

Don’t look at Picasa as a replacement for a full featured video tool. You’re not going to make a masterpiece. However, you don’t need much more to make quick video blog posts. The one sorely missing piece from this is the ability to string more than one video clip together like you can slides in a slide show.

Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums is technically a separate product, but the desktop software and the Web album are certainly very connected.In Picasa 3, you can select folders to automatically sync, so any changes to pictures on your desktop are reflected in the Web album. Although I generally prefer Flickr to Picasa Web Albums, the desktop syncing is a superior feature.

Screen Captures

This is a nice touch. Whenever you take a screen capture using the standard print screen button, it’s saved to Picasa. You can then edit it or add text. It would really complete the feature if you could also add arrows or circles.

Mini Viewer

Rather than launching Picasa every time you want to preview a picture, Picasa 3 has a mini viewer that lets you take a quick look at photos.

The Bad

There are times when the interface is confusing. When viewing thumbnails, the scroll bar on the right side of the menu does not change relative to your location in the list. Instead, it controls the speed and direction of scrolling. This is vertigo inducing and confusing to users not familiar with this type of navigation. The Timeline button is also not very useful for navigation, and it almost seems out of place with the rest of the application.

Overall

Photos by Marziah Karch
Interface issues aside, this is one of the best photo organization tools I’ve seen at any price. The integration with other Google products, like Gmail, Shopping, Blogger, and YouTube is a nice touch, and its really nice to not be tied to a single photo processor for prints.Picasa begs for comparison with Apple iLife, and it actually comes out favorably. The Mac OS version is still in beta, but it’s also worth exploring. If you have digital photos , I’d definitely recommend Picasa.

Source: http://google.about.com

Category: Graphics Software, Software Review  | Tags: , ,