Keep Your Photos Organized Picasa is a free program from Google that makes managing thousands of photographs on your computer easy, making them easier to organize and locate the ones you want. Plus it performs basic photo manipulations as well as uploading them online for sharing! Available both PCs and Mac OS X systems alike for ease of use but contains some functions which might not be immediately obvious or easily accessible; its user friendly layout offers quick navigation between functions.
Once installed, Picasa searches your entire computer or external hard drives for image files (jpegs, bitmaps, and tiffs) before creating a library of all of them and organizing them by date taken. It will even organize pictures that exist across more than one folder/drive. In addition to organizing them into folders by date taken and folder by drive number if applicable; additionally it creates albums as well as web pages featuring your images that you can share with friends and family.
Picasa can automatically resize and crop your pictures, retouch them to remove red eye effects, apply captions, improve color balance, add special effects such as blurring or sharpening, create slideshows or movies with them and reduce file sizes or add captions that will become IPTC metadata that most image viewers can read.
Picasa also allows you to tag photos with details about their subject matter such as location or event and then organizes them automatically into albums for you. Furthermore, this software identifies faces and can search by name for specific people or objects within a photo album. Finally, geotagging capabilities make it simple to find scenic landscape photographs when visiting places like Yellowstone National Park.
Picasa 3 offers users easy access to its photo editing features, but its primary benefit lies in uploading albums of pictures directly onto the web and sharing them. You can set privacy for each album so only certain people can see it, or list it publicly and make it accessible by all.
The bottom horizontal toolbar features eight shortcut entries by default: upload, e-mail, print, export, shop, blog this and collage. You can modify these by accessing Tools > Configure Buttons; however it would be nice if there was also an option to post selected photos directly to Google Buzz or Twitter accounts as well as directly posting to Facebook and Google+ accounts from within Picasa itself. Overall Picasa is an effective program that makes storing, manipulating and sharing digital photographs easy.