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Editor’s Rating: 4.75 out of 5
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Introduction / Overview

Picasa is free digital photo album software from Google that helps users instantly find, edit and share all the photos on their PC. Picasa automatically locates all the images on your computer and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names that can be easily recognized.

As soon as you start Picasa, after installation, it will catalog all of the images on your hard drive and if you wish you can take some time to organize and rename these folders.

Picasa organizes the 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.

Features

Picasa is good choice for casual users and non techie people, its interface is easy enough to work with and simple enough to understand. You can find almost all commonly used functions on the main screen itself in the form of large icons. More advanced functions are available in the drop down menus.

You can edit picture within Picasa. As soon as you double click on any of the pictures, it brings up ‘Basic Fixes’, which include cropping, straightening, red-eye removal, color and brightness adjustments and auto color balance. Picture can be fine tuned using the ‘Tuning’ and tab which lets you change color temperature, highlight the picture, shadow and fill light. Under the “Effect” tab, you can change picture effects from the available options. You can play around with the picture by changing its effects to available twelve different options. But the best part is that Picasa doesn’t touch your original photo. What ever you change in your picture, it is stored in the form of edits within picasa.ini files that reside in the same directory as the photos. For example, the program knows you want a photo cropped a certain way, so it presents it to you that way even though the actual picture isn’t touched. Instead, it reads the picasa.ini file to know how to change things.

Users can organize photos into virtual albums or “labels” that don’t correspond to the standard windows file system, and you retain the ability to use the same photo across multiple albums. While organizing your pictures, you can also change filenames, key in captions, and add ratings to your favorites.

One very important and useful feature of Picasa is that it allows you to group the pictures together into a professional slide show that can be shared with anyone. This can be sent via Google web album or email.

Picasa has one feature for bloggers also. With ‘Blog This’ feature, bloggers can connect and start their own blog. This is mainly intended for users who want to post pictures on their blogs as well and share them with friends.

Another important and practical user-friendly feature is the ‘Gift CD’. This lets you combine however many pictures you want and burn them to a CD.

Installation

Picasa requires 250MHz, 64MB RAM, 25MB Disk Space, Windows 98 as minimum configuration to support installation. However, we recommend at least 500MHz, 128MB RAM, 30MB Disk Space and Windows XP for optimal functionality.

Step 1:
You can download the latest version of Picasa installer from here. The current version is Picasa v2.6.0.

Step 2:
Locate the file you downloaded in step 1. It should be called ‘Picasa2.exe’. Double click on the file to start installation. Once the install is under way agree to the license and accept the suggested default options or you may use custom if you an advanced user. Choose the location you want to use for installation. The default is c:\program files\Picasa2\

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Free of cost
• It integrates with other free Google services (Blogger, Hello & Web Albums).
• Provides good red-eye removal, quick fixes and effects, and online sharing options
• Editing info is stored in INI files, making all edits reversible without saving multiple versions.
• Automatic import from USB cameras, scanners, memory card readers, and CD drives. Good support for RAW files
• Display your pictures as a custom screen saver, collage, or slide show movie.
• Good for non-technical persons and casual digital photographers

Cons

• Uses a folder-based system of organization.
• Edits are not displayed outside of Picasa.
• Limited organizational and searching features.

Conclusion

This is one of the best photo organization tools available for free. Picasa is good for you if you are a casual or a non techie user. Picasa is worth the download if you want to add some cool effects in your pictures, build a slide show, burn your pictures onto a CD or just share them with people using ‘HELLO’.

But if you are a more serious and professional user and wants to organize your large collection of pictures, then I recommend you to look elsewhere.