Picasa Review
So you've just bough a digital camera and you're wondering what to do with the images? Well, you could do much worse than take a look at Picasa, an image organizer suite from Google. The first reason to try it is that it's absolutely free, but the second and third reasons are that it actually does a pretty good job and it's quite easy to use. It's certainly no substitute for programs like Adobe's Photoshop or Lightroom, but you could easily spend $1000 on such software packages and for beginners, they're likely to be too complex as well as too expensive. Picasa does a pretty decent job of being a simple image editor, organizer and image sharing program and it does it all for free.
History
Picasa is a photo organizer, a basic photo editor, an album/gallery creator and a tool for uploading images to websites, blogs and digital photofinishers. It was originally developed and sold as commercial software by Idealab, but it was acquired in July of 2004 by Google and then made available at no charge to anyone who wanted it. A major update (v2.0.0) was released in January of 2005 which had many new features and there have been several more releases, the latest (as of December 2005) being v2.5.0 which was fully released in September 2006. Development is continuing. In August 2006 v Google acquired Neven Vision who were developing software to search for features in images such as people or buildings. Google have said that this technology will be applied to searching for photos within Picasa at some point in the near future
Features
It's hard to fully describe all the features of Picasa, but here are just a few of them.
- Scan a folder or an entire drive for all image files.
- Automatically scan for new images on a selected drive or in selected folders
- Sort the files by date
- Move files between folders by "drag and drop"
- Rename single files or groups of files
- Make virtual Albums (the images stay in their original location)
- One image can appear in multiple albums without consuming additional disk space
- Add a "star" rating to selected images
- Crop, rotate, fix red-eye, adjust contrast, color and saturation of images
- Apply effects such as B&W, Sepia, Soft focus, Film Grain, Sharpening etc.
- Add caption sto images using IPTC standards (captions are included in the image file)
- View EXIF data and RGB histograms
- Resize images and attach them to email
- Create albums and export image galleries to your website
- Export images directly to your Blogger blog
- Make slideshows
- Resize images for printing
- Upload images directly to online printing services
- Archive images on CD or DVD
- Create slide show CDs
- Create a movie file form selected image collections
- Make desktop images and screensavers
- Make large posters by printing an image on multiple sheets of paper
- Export images to a TiVoŽ Series2™ DVR connected to a home PC network
Availability
Picasa is available as a totally free download from Google. You can download a free software suite which includes Picasa, Google Earth (a 3-D map program), Google desktop, A photo screensaver and a bunch of other useful utilities. You can select exactly which programs you want to install. You can customize and download Google pack from the link below.
Why are they free
Google gives away these programs in order to strengthen their brand image. In addition they tie into other google services like Blogger and Picasa Web Albums (which gives you 250MB of free web space to store your images online, or 6GB of space for $25/yr). Picasa also allows you to upload images directly to digital printing labs which I presume pay Google a commission on sales!
