"We
built Picasa because we were frustrated with how difficult it was to find,
organize and do things with our digital pictures. Picasa 1.0 was released in
September and since then we've been getting rave reviews from our users and
the press. We've also received great feedback on how Picasa could be even
better. Well, we've listened and have released Picasa 1.6. We kept everything
that was great about 1.0 and added things like more file formats, movie
support, cropping, and much, much more! If you didn't try Picasa before, now
you have even more reasons to try!"
A couple of things that are really nice. When you first start the
program, it will go out and automatically look in every folder -
you can narrow it down to a set of folders if needed - and catalog each folder
that has pictures and also catalog them by time.
Another nice feature - you can see the thumbnails of all of your pictures
easily. No need to click on anything. In another program, Nikon
View, that came with our Nikon 4300 Coolpix, you need to click on a folder to
see the thumbnails. This user interface is much easier to navigate.
Cool feature - you can select pictures from multiple folders and put them in
a picture tray. This picture tray can be used to select pictures that you
may want to email, print out later, or some other actions.
Picasa Review - Email Features
Emailing pictures is very easy with Picasa. We hate it
when people send uncompressed or resized pictures to us via email.
Why? In order to view them, you have to save them and then view it with
another program and do not forget how long they take to download.
Picasa allows to you select the pictures and then resize them
quickly for easy emailing. You can choose your own email program or have
Picasa send them for you using their internet email program - nice.
Picasa Review - Cool Timeline Viewing
Now we really like this feature here. Base on the
timestamps of your photographs you can quickly see the timeline of your
pictures. Here is a sample screenshot:
Move the bottom slider to move throughout time and see thumbnails for that
period. Quickly create a slide shows even with music.Easy
Photograph Editing
Remember we like things easy to save time and maximize
results. Picasa does allow for very easy picture editing. You can
easily correct red-eye, crop and enhance a picture. The following is a
screen shot for editing a pciture:
Auto Enhance
Here is a sample of using the auto enhance feature. The
follow picture is one that we use to show how not using a flash can make a
picture look great - click
here see when to use a digital camera flash. But the colors do need a bit of snap and this
picture could be brighter. With Picasa, this is a one button click to fix.
Before enhancing:
After enhancing:
Nice change to the picture! All with a click of a button. Another
nice feature is that these changes are not saved to the picture itself.
You can always reverse or undo your changes at any time.
Red-Eye Correction
Red-eye correction is a simple two step process:
Step 1: Click on the red-eye button and then highlight the
region of the eye that needs correction:
Step 2: Notice how we placed a box around the eye:
After placing the box - no more red-eye!
Summary - Picasa Review
As you can see in our Picasa review, we really liked Picasa. Simple, easy-to-use and pretty
powerful. Now it may not have all the bells and whistles of some other
products but it does handle the most common tasks nicely. It used to cost $29,
now free from Google!
Back to the top of Google's Picasa
Review.
