Google Picassa
If you have not taken a look at Google Picassa recently, please read on. If you already use it.. I don’t have any new information here.
My Desktop PC has lots of photos and short movie clips taken with standard digital cameras. Some of the older photos were scanned in when I first started using digital photography. The collection is over 10GB in size and includes nearly 10,000 files in over 350 folders. Google Picassa is a free software package that helps me manage all of this visual data.
Picassa can import photos from cameras or memory cards. It organizes photos into folders based on events you define. The primary display of Picassa can sort your photo folders by creation date, recent changes, size, or name. Pictures can be tagged and placed into Albums that contain photos that exist in multiple file folders. Your best photos can be “starred” for easy identification. This is great for when you have a series of the same basic picture, but no one is blinking in one of them.
I use Picassa for basic photo touchs such as cropping, removing red-eye, even or minor brightness corrections. More advanced corrections and editing will require another software package such as Adobe’s Photoshop.
Showing off your photos is easy with several options for slide shows. You can display your photos in an automatic or manual slideshow right from Picassa. You can also associate an Album with the Picassa screensaver. Most impressive is the on-line slideshow available with the integrated free hosting site called Picass Web Albums. Simply press a button to send multiple high resolution photos to your personal photo site. You can then just simply e-mail a link to everyone who you want to see photos of your kids, new puppy, or special someone. I started using Picassa Web Albums instead of Flickr and WebShots to post my online photo album and even to order prints (not free.)
I have tried other photo management software including software bundled with Windows Vista, Nikon and Kodak cameras and HP printers. None of them work as well as Picassa. The product is very easy to use, and adaptable to almost any organizing scheme I have encountered.
If you have a PC and digital camera, try out Picassa soon!
