With the invent of digital cameras, more so as an inbuilt part of an increasing number of mobile phones, it is common for people to have a large collection of photos. Even though you may not be a professional photographer, the number of your photos may easily run into thousands. So, you need to manage them to make it easier for you to find them conveniently as and when needed. You may also like to edit them for some special effects, and of course, you’d like to share your photos with your friends and family members. There would be many photos that you’d be keen to share with the whole world. Well, Picasa is a free software from Google that makes it easy to perform all these tasks. Edit them. Manage them. Share them. And, more.
Download: You can download Picasa from here.
Once you’ve installed Picasa, you can immediately use it to organize the photos on your computer. It can scan your computer for photos, pictures, images as desired by you. Select the image file types that you want Picasa to look for. Also select the folders in which to look for photos. You can exercise full control as to how your photos should be organized. You can select the JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TGA, TIF, TIFF, PSD files, etc. Likewise, you can also select file types in various movie formats such as Quicktime movies (MOV) and AVI, MPG, ASF, WMV, etc. You can also import photos from your digital cameras.
In Picasa, you can organize your photos on the basis of folders, albums and people.
Folders in Picasa correspond to the folders on your computer. This may be the easiet way to organize your pictures. However, organizing photos in albums in Picasa is different from folders on your computer. When you organize your photos in albums in Picasa, what you’re actually doing is creating virtual groups of photos drawn from multiple folders on your computer. The advantage of albums is that the photos in an album are displayed without actually moving the photo from the physical folder on your computer. It is just a virtual list or grouping of photos. Therefore, if you delete or move a photo from an album, the original photo will still remain in its original folder on your computer.
The third way to organize photos in Picasa is on the basis of people in them. Using facial recognition technology, Picasa can automatically search across your entire collection of photos and group similar faces together. The latest version, Picasa 3.6, supports name tags being added to photos. You can easily create people albums by adding name tags to the groups of (similar) faces. However, it may be pointed out that the facial recognition technology may not be perfect, due to which you may notice that grouping of photos on the basis of similar faces may not be satisfactory.
Picasa provides several editing tools to improve the quality of your photos in one-click steps without needing any special expertise. It provides three types of easy-to-use editing tools.
(1) Basic fixes include cropping, straightening, removing redeye, retouching blemishes, or adding text to your photos. Picasa also provides “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that is an automatic one-click fix and adjusts your photo’s color and contrast automatically to produce the best possible photo.
(2) Tuning tools allow you to adjust the color and lighting in your photos. You can use the sliders for Fill Light, Highlights, Shadows, Color Temperature, etc., to manually adjust the color and lighting in the photos. There is also a “magic wands” tool for automatic lighting / color fixes.
(3) Picasa provides 12 effects to improve the quality of your photos. These are: Sharpen, Sepia, Black & White, Filtered Black & White, Focal Black & White, Warm the photo, Film Grain, apply Tint, Graduated Tint, Saturation, Soft Focus, and Glow.
You can freely try these automatic editing tools without worrying about damaging the original photo, since Picasa preserves your original photo while you’re editing it. The editing changes made by you are visible only in Picasa until you save your changes. In fact, even when you save the editing changes, Picasa leaves the original photo preserved and creates a new version of the photo by applying your editing effects.
Picasa makes it easy to share your photos with your family members and friends. If you so wish, you can share your photos with everyone by making them public. Sharing is made easy by two methods.
Firstly, you can share your photos (selected photos or the entire album) by uploading them to Picasa Web Albums on the Internet. Just click the Upload button for that purpose. It may be pointed out that you get up to 1 GB free space on Picasa Web Albums to store and share your photos. If you want more space, you can get paid space as per your needs.
Secondly, you can share the selected photos by clicking the Email button to send them to your friends by email.
Many other features:
Picasa offers many other features, such as resizing a photo, making a collage of your photos, adding captions to your photos, geo-tagging photos by embedding latitude and longitude information in the photo files, printing photos, uploading photos to your blog, etc.
To conclude, Picasa is an excellent photo editing, managing and sharing software. And, you cannot beat its price since it is absolutely free. If you’re still not convinced, you may watch the following YouTube video introducing features of Picasa:
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