What's New At Picasa?

The Picasa Web Album Makes A Great Addition To Photo Sharing With Ease

If you haven't used Picasa yet, you might want to check it out. It's a Google service that simplifies sorting and uploading your photos. The first thing you need is a Google account, which is free and easy to create. Just pick a user name and password to register.

Once logged on to your Google account, you'll be able to download the Picasa software to your PC, which will make photo management a snap. (Picasa also is available on the Mac for new versions of OS X, but many of the features are not yet available on the Mac.)

Easily find photos on your computer

Before sharing your photos, you'll want to find and sort them into categories, topics, themes or dates. After you download and activate the Picasa software, you can run a search on your entire computer or in specific files to locate every image.

The great thing about Picasa is that it doesn't copy all those images, because that would really overload your computer disc space. Instead, it creates a list of all the photos and images on your system. It displays the folders containing your images complete with dates.

When the software is done organizing, you can go through all those folders in Picasa's browser to select the images you want to put into albums. Drag and drop certain photos into different folders by subject, date or any naming method you wish. Rename images and folders as you go to make them more specific.

You can even add a star to indicate your favorite photos. This makes it very easy to create albums out of just those selections.

Use Picasa to edit your photos

Picasa has a fantastic photo-editing component that makes fixing your images simple and straightforward. Using slide bars, you can lighten images, remove red eye, crop, straighten and much more. If it pleases you, you can add a simple special effect. The sepia effect makes images look old-fashioned.

Get really creative and do a photo collage. Just click the "collage" button, pick a few photos you like and hit "create". Your images will appear in one image. Neat!

Easily prepare albums for uploading

Choose your favorite images and folders to create albums for sharing online, and then upload them to your Picasa Web Albums. Simply pick the photos to upload and click the "Web Album" button at the bottom of the Picasa software. You will be automatically taken to your Picasa Web Album account where you can post your images.

Picasa is an amazing piece of software that makes editing, sorting and sharing your images quick, convenient and fun.