A Review of Picasa – Free Management Software For Your Photos

What exactly is Picasa?

Picasa is free, software which you can download from Google which allows you to organise your digital photos/photos'>photos, edit them, email or share them, and it is very easy to use.

You can find Picasa by typing “google picasa” in your search box and, if Google search is used, Picasa will be the first entry on the results page. You can download from there.

When Picasa is downloaded it will seek and will find all the pictures on your computer, including “My Pictures” and install and organise them in folders on Picasa

There you will see a list in the left-hand sidebar of the Library view which will show all the folders containing these photos/photos'>photos. By default this list will be sorted by creation date, however this order can be changed.

In the main body of the screen will be thumbnails of all your pictures, sorted by Album so you can very easily scroll through all your photos.

Additional photos can be imported directly from your camera via USB cable, via a card reader, or by importing from a CD/DVD, a webpage, a PDF file, from GMail or other mail, a shared network device and even from a camera phone via normal transfer mechanism i.e. Bluetooth.

Photo file types that are compatible are JPG, GIF, TIF, PSD, PNG, BMP, RAW.

Movie file types: MPG, AVI, ASF, WMV,MOV.

Editing is easy and in most cases will tweak your photos sufficiently for most purposes.

When you double-click on “Edit photo” or the thumbnail, the photo will shown on the screen and editing can take place.

Editing options are as follows:

Crop, straighten, Red Eye, Auto Contrast, Auto Color, Fill Light, Fill light slider, Highlights slider, Shadows slider, Color Temperature slider, Neutral Color, Sharpen, Sepia, Black and White, Warmify,

Film Grain, Tint, Saturation, Soft focus, Filtered B