Picasa…
I am pretty excited to write about Picasa, but not for the reason you might think. You see, I have about 2,000 pictures that I’ve taken since I got our new camera February. And that is just the beginning. I also have 700 wedding pictures from a couple of years ago, 1,200 pictures from our trip to Europe, and another 2,500 random pictures. And that is only the main hard drive – I have a separate hard drive that has all my old pictures from my old computer totaling in the multi-thousands.
That being said, I need to do some major work on my photo collection. I have blinking eye photos, blurry night shots, and pictures of the ground. It used be that you had 24 to 27 shots and you had to use them wisely. But with the new found convenience of digital photography, we are getting lazy and taking extra shots and not necessarily deleting the bad ones.
Picasa is going to help me organize my photo collection. I’ve let this slide for too long. Tonight you get the unique pleasure of learning about a great photo organization and sharing tool while The Digitante gets his life in order. Huzzah!
A bit different
Picasa is different than most Google services, mostly because Picasa was not a part of Google for a long time. Picasa is a photo organization tool and it mostly operates on your local computer. Unlike other Google tools, it is a download but like other Google offerings, its free.
After downloading and installing Picasa 3 (the current version), the first task is to allow Picasa to find all the photos on your computer. If you leave all your photos in one place, you can have it only check in a limited number of spots. However, I keep my photos on multiple hard drives and all over my main drive. For my first run through, I’m going to do a full scan.
While scanning, you have the option of using Picasa as your default picture viewer. Its up to you. I am going to select it, just so I can have a chance to try it out on a more regular basis.
Once all your photos are loaded you have a couple of options.
Get to editing
I used the term editing loosely. Picasa basically provides you with buttons that allow you to perform simple tasks such as touching up blemishes, adding text or a watermark, and straighten or crop a photo. In true Google fashion, they also have an I’m Feeling Lucky button which attempts to automagically adjust all the editing tools to give you a great picture (hopefully!).
Below are two pictures, a before and after using the I’m Feeling Lucky button, so you can get a taste of what its capable of:
As you can see, the quick edit changed up the contrast and definitely gave it a much brighter look. And in case you didn’t know, that is me (Andy – The Digitante) and one of my daughters when she was about two months old.
Your next move
So now that your pictures all look professional quality due to the carpal tunnel inducing clicking you did with the I’m Feeling Lucky button (Kidding! Try using GIMP for a more professional approach), you have a number of options for your photo collection.
First and foremost, you can upload your pictures to Google’s online portion of Picasa called Picasaweb. And with Picasa’s sync feature, you can even edit your pictures AFTER you’ve uploaded them and all your changes will be uploaded to the online photo as well. That means no remembering which photos you changed. You can upload up to 1Gb of photos for free to Picasaweb. Then the prices run from $20/yr for 10Gb (about 4,000 standard pictures) up to $500/yr for 400Gb (useful for extremely large, high quality RAW formatted images). Uploading your photos also serves as a backup in case anything would happen to your computer and you would lose all your photos.
You can also email your pictures. The best feature here is the ability to have Picasa attach resized photos, meanwhile, your original photos are left untouched. Be sure not to resize them too small or your recipients may have trouble getting a good print.
Speaking of prints, you can elect to print your photos on your own photo printer or you can also order prints from over a dozen online photo printing shops.
Additionally, there are features that allow you to publish photos directly to your blog, “geo-tag” photos marking their location on a map, making collages, and making slideshow movies.
My next move
Now that I’ve worked with Picasa a bit, I need to work on some of its other features such as tagging people in my photos (it has a face finding feature) and renaming my collection so it is easier to navigate. Picasa has definitely made my life much easier and less overwhelming, even in the short time I’ve used it.
If you would like to discover how Picasa can simplify your photo organization, feel free to email or call The Digitante by heading over to the About page. There you can find all my contact information.
Email Subscription
Visit Amazon
Blogged.com
