Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you:
* Locate and organise all the photos on your computer.
* Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
* Share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web: it’s fast, easy and free.
Take your photos further with Picasa from Google
Organise
Picasa instantly locates and organises all the pictures on your computer.
Find the pictures you forgot you had.
Picasa organises your entire collection while you watch, scanning the images on your computer and automatically sorting them by date.
Move and re-name pictures from inside Picasa
Want to clean up messy folders and move pictures around on your computers hard drive? Simply drag and drop pictures from one folder in Picasa to another. Picasa will make the change permanent after double-checking with you. Want to change a pictures filename from 671056398a.jpg to Lisa.jpg? In Picasa, it only takes seconds to re-name one picture or a group of pictures.
Make an album
Use the "Albums" collection to tag your photos into quick groupings inside Picasa. Viewing and sharing the pictures you grouped under an album is easy – they make great slideshows and movies or you can email them to friends.
Add a star rating
Give a gold star to any photo you love: it turns your favourites into visual standouts at a glance. Picasa even has a star search that reduces your entire photo collection to the best of the best in less than a second.
Keep one picture in multiple albums
Picasa creates a new “instance” of each photo you label without taking up more space on your computer, so you can put the same picture into multiple albums.
Password-protect collections
Have photos you want to keep to yourself? You can add passwords to any of your Picasa collections (this does not affect which pictures you and others can see on your computer’s hard drive).
Edit
Turn a grey sky into a picture-perfect day.
Basic Fixes are back – and better
Picasas Basic Fixes are buttons that make it fast and easy to crop, remove red eye, fix the contrast and colour, and enhance your digital pictures.
Amazing effects turn so-so pictures into works of art
You can see how much Picasas 12 new visual effects can improve your photos – and in seconds, not hours. Go sepia. Warmify. Make pictures pop with colour or try austere black-and-white. Try easy one-clicks or the more finely tuned sliders for better control where you want it. And of course, you can undo your changes at any step along the way.
Write captions that stay with the picture
Picasa makes captions the way journalists do – using the IPTC standard. That means your captions are saved within their pictures and stay with them, whether you export as a web page or make a CD presentation. Picasa captions are fully editable and searchable, and you choose whether to display them or not.
Zoom. Pan. Tilt. Get the angle you intended.
So you did not get the shot? With Picasa, that is not the end of the story. Go in closer and move the focus slightly to the left. Your camera was slightly crooked? So what? Your picture is perfect anyway.
Know how to use a camera in manual mode?
Photography aficionados can now fine-tune their photos with Picasas EXIF display. This window shows you all the camera data that is stored in a pictures original file - such as camera model, date the photo was taken, even if a flash was used. The EXIF display also has a RGB histogram, a real-time graph that shows the intensity of colours in your picture and how they change when you make edits in Picasa.
Share
The hardest part of sharing your pictures is choosing your favourites.
Gmail
Send photos via email that are a joy to receive
Take the guesswork out of sending photos. Picasa automatically resizes and attaches pictures to email messages at sizes your friends will be able to open. Works with most email programs, including Google Mail.
Put pictures on your own site, for free
Picasa Web Albums is the fast and easy way to put your photos on the web. Just select the photos in Picasa that you want to share and click to publish. In seconds, those photos are on your own web page, ready to share with the people you know. Check out a few things you can
do with Picasa Web Albums
If youre looking to post multiple photos onto your blog, Picasas "BlogThis!" button does the hard work for you by automatically transferring selected photos directly to Blogger.
Make beautiful slide shows
With Picasa, you can turn a group of photos into a presentation with one click, then share your slide show on a CD.
Move to any device or folder
You can take your photos with you no matter how you like to carry them. Picasa works with all the newest compact flash devices.
Prints & Products
Print beautiful pictures at home with more custom sizes or order prints, gifts and books from your favourite online companies.
Printing
Custom and standard sizes are now fit to print at home.
Picasa automatically fits your pictures perfectly onto the expensive paper used by your home printer. It is finally easy to print wallets, 4×6, 5×7, full pages, more sizes and even (hallelujah!) more than one picture on a page.
Print Order
Export pictures to popular photo processing websites.
You can pick photos straight out of Picasa and upload them directly to your favourite photo finishers to order prints and other products.
Backup
Do not lose your digital memories. Safely back up your photos with Picasa 2.
Burn to CD or DVD for archive purposes.
Picasa makes it easy to protect your pictures by archiving them on a CD or DVD. Picasa even displays the pictures that have not yet been backed up to make absolutely sure you do not make mistakes with images that matter.
Give gift CDs with slide shows.
Effortlessly create slide show CDs for friends and family.
Create a network backup of your pictures.
Save to a folder on your computer, plus any device that is an external drive or disk. Moving edited pictures out of Picasa has always been as easy as clicking the Export button. Now you can also control the quality and sizes of your exported pictures. Picasa even will save photos back to any drive, including the newest flash memory cards and sticks.
Create
Enjoy your pictures in fun, creative ways – it is what photography is all about!
Turn your photos into a movie.
It is so easy to play filmmaker with your pictures. Select your best shots, then adjust the delay time, dimensions, and video compression settings. That is it – Picasa will render a movie, complete with title graphics, that you can play and share.
Make a personalised desktop picture or screensaver.
Your best pictures are now on display. Pick a favourite photo as your desktop picture or add several into your screensaver rotation. What better way to enjoy your photographic genius at your desk?
Create a poster
Picasa can tile any picture you select, allowing you to print each part and reassemble them at poster size – up to 1,000% larger than the original.
Make picture collages.
Select a group of pictures, choose one of the beautiful templates, and Picasa will create a collage that expands your creative horizons. Picture pile it. Make a multi-exposure image. Create a contact sheet. Done? Simply save your collage to a folder, as a new desktop background or as a screensaver.
System Requirements
Picasa requires:
* PC with 300MHz Pentium® processor and MMX® technology.
* 64 MB RAM (128MB Recommended)
* 50 MB available hard disk space (100MB recommended)
* 800 × 600 pixels, 16 bit colour monitor.
* Windows XP/Vista/7
* Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.01 or better (6.0 recommended). If at any time you get an “unable to authenticate” error, you should upgrade to IE 6.0.
* Microsoft® DirectX 7.0 or higher (8.1 ships with XP, 9.0b recommended).
* Optional: 56K Internet connection speed or better (for access to any online services).
Related information about Picasa:
File types supported include:
Images: jpg, bmp, gif, png, psd, tif
Movies: avi, mpg, wmv, asf, mov (QuickTime)
RAW data files, including cameras from Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Minolta and Pentax.
Currently available in Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, English (US and UK), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
