Organizing and Sharing Pictures with Picasa 3
Google's Free Image Editing Tool for Beginners and Experts
Aug 18, 2009
To get started with Picasa 3, download the application from Google's web site. Once downloaded and installed, users will notice a period where the Picasa 3 program search the computer's hard drive for digital images and video to add to the library of the program.
How to Organize Pictures in Picasa
Selecting the Folder Manager from the Tools menu inside the program opens a window with the local and external hard drives of the computer displayed in the left panel and a set of three options on the right hand side. Users can choose which folders the Picasa program must search for new images and which folders to ignore or which folders to scan only once. As soon as users add new images to any of the folders marked as, add to Picasa, the images will automatically update into the program as soon as it is loaded onto the computer.
The list of folders displayed in the Picasa library refer to the actual location of photo's on the computer's hard drives and moving or deleting a photo will result in deleting the file from the original directory where it is stored on the computer. Albums are, however, only created in Picasa itself and moving or deleting an album will not affect the photographs originally stored.
Another method of organizing photos in Picasa is to affix a star rating to favorite photos. When searching for particular photographs, a filter can be applied which shows only the photo's bearing the star, thus limiting the time searching for a particular photo. Users can also tag each photo with a keyword to simplify searching for a specific photo or batch of photos.
Photo's can be geo tagged and a location added with Google Earth, which is another free application from Google.
Sharing Photo's and Video with Picasa 3
The Picasa 3 program makes creating albums and sharing photos on-line easy. There are shortcuts built in the program to facilitate one button uploads to popular album and photo sharing internet platforms like Blogger, Flickr, Picasa web albums and You Tube. Building a slide show movie is done by dragging and dropping images to the movie screen and selecting a sound track, templates and font. This slide show movie can be uploaded immediately to You Tube, thus saving a lot of time.
Drag and drop album building with the option of creating collages enables the user to share selected photo's and e-mail the photo's which is automatically reduced in size to make e- mailing the images easier.
Other Functions Making Picasa 3 Popular
Picasa 3 also offers basic editing functions that are easy to use and requires no special skill or knowledge of photo editing. Reducing red eyes when using a flash is done with the click of one button and a horizon that is skew is fixed by dragging the horizon to the correct position.
Although professional photographers might frown upon the simplicity of the Picasa 3 application, it is an excellent starting point for amateur photographers who want to organize their digital photos and perform some basic editing.
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