Find and organize

After you install Picasa, it asks if you’d like to scan you entire computer or just the desktop, my pictures and my documents folders. Feel free to choose one of those options and Picasa will automatically scan your entire computer for JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD even for movie files. And with just a couple of minutes your photos already organized by date and initially retained same file structure as your hard drive. The main area shows thumbnails of the images, and along the right side is a scroll bar to navigate. It’s pretty neat and simple.

Picasa gives you easy and powerful way to search your library. It’s has tag feature that allows you categories each photo and give them caption if you like. Looking to your albums or photos is not difficult anymore, you just type on the search field or you can filter them by showing only photos with faces or specific colors.

Create, edit and share

In Picasa you can create many ways to share your photos. By selecting some of them, you can create photo collage, video clip presentation, gift CD, or export it to another folder. All of those features are presented in simple and elegantly especially for photo collage which is I really love it.

If you double click a photo, you can enter an editing room to crop, fix red eye, straighten photos, adjust color, and apply special effects like film grain or soft focus. The editing room even has an I’m Feeling Lucky button, just like the Google search engine, which automatically applies recommended effects.

Sharing photos to your friends, family and to the world in Picasa is easy. You can select photos and email them as attachments. And if you’re Blogger user, you can post photos directly to your Blogger account. Picasa resizes the photos for the web for this, if you wish. You can also tell where you shot each photo and view them in Google Earth by using Geotagging. Uploading and synchronizing to the Web Albums is instant also.

Miniview

One of great feature that I really like from Picasa is Miniview. It is embedded to Windows Explorer and it represents nice preview for your picture even PSD. It’s really good feature because it’s avoids you from launching Picasa every time. On miniview you can zoom, rotate, slideshow and favorite your photos. And if you want to edit with it, just simply click Edit in Picasa and Picasa will be launched. Nice.

Overall

Picasa is very intuitive and well designed for amateurs and basic editing package. Its gives you a new experience for exploring your images library and it’s the best photo organization tools I’ve seen at any price. Picasa is a must-have application and most of all, it’s totally free.

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