Managing Pictures With Picasa

For those of you who can’t stop clicking with your digital cameras, and have already piled up a huge collection of photographs that you’re struggling to manage(just like me), the great people at google have brought you the perfect thing - Picasa.

Picasa 2

Picasa’s a photo organizer, just like Adobe’s Photoshop Album or JASC Photo Album. But what makes it different is it’s size(3.2MB compared to Adobe Photoshop Album’s 190MB) and it’s powerful, it’s low on system resources, has great enhancements for beginners and everything else you’d want in a photo organizer, and to top it off, it’s really simple to use.

Features/Pros:-

• Neat and clean interface, perfect for a beginner
• Zoom, up to 450% more than the original picture.
• Red eye removal(a common problem in digital cameras because of multiple flashes, easily removed)
• I’m Feeling Lucky! (one of the best auto-correction options i have ever seen)
• Great organization (by date, album, etc.), that’s what it’s meant for
• Import pictures from external drives to your HDD without hassles
• Burn to CD or upload directly to your Blog
• Integrated with GMail for sending pictures. You can also use Outlook/Outlook Express directly.
• Add keywords to files and search by keywords or album information.
• Slide show, captions and collages
• Share directly with friends online through the “Hello” Plug-in
• Batch Renaming
• Also manages video clips
• Absolutely free

Cons:-

• Not meant for advanced users(it‘s only an organizer)
• Custom format and resolution changes not possible

The Verdict -
For Intermediate and Advanced Users, the likes of ACDSee and Adobe’s Photoshop Album may be the preferred choice, but Picasa’s winning point is that it’s really easy, provides very good features, uses very little computer resources, and makes you stick to it.