Freeware
Picasa: Positively Perfect Picture Presentation
Developer: Google, formerly Idealab
Version: 2.7
Download Picasa Here.
Aside from my web browser and my music player, there are few programs that I use on a daily basis. Picasa, a program that I’ve been using since the day it was offered as a free download, just happens to be one of them.
One of my hobbies is taking photographs. Mostly architectural, although I do enjoy shooting photos of my family and friends too. As you can imagine, I’ve amassed quite a collection of pictures over the years, so I needed something easy to use and extremely handy to organize them all. Whatever that program was, it didn’t have to have a whole lot of picture editing functions - I had Photoshop [review] for that - it just needed to help me keep my pictures organized. And Picasa has done that phenomenally well. So well in fact that I really miss it when I’m using my MacBook.
For a free program, Picasa is positively amazing. The amount of built in features and ability to interface with the web via GMail [review] and Picasa Web Albums is great. There are even plugins that allow Picasa to upload your pictures to Flickr if you’re into that. It’s just incredible the amount of things that are built into this free program.
From photo organization, the primary reason why I got into Picasa in the first place, to simple tweaks and crops, Picasa really is a Swiss Army knife of a program. Hell, it’s also one of the few programs that I can use to view my Canon RAW files before I open them in Photoshop or another image editing program. And it will even organize my movies and videos too. How cool is that?
The big question, though, is what’s the catch? How can a free program like this exist in the first place? To be honest, I can’t understand it either. Picasa’s competition is not free. Programs like iPhoto, Aperture, Adobe Bridge (bundled with CS3), and Adobe Lightroom all cost quite a bit - so why doesn’t Picasa. It really makes me nervous, though, seeing as how all of the other programs in the same market can command such premiums. I don’t know what I would do if Picasa were suddenly priced at the same level as Lightroom or Aperture. I certainly wouldn’t like it - that’s for sure.
All in all, Picasa is still totally free and is absolutely worth the download if you are on Windows or Linux.
Now if Google would only port it over to the Mac. The Web Albums Uploader just isn’t enough Picasa goodness for me.
- Eric Norton
I just downloaded Picasa and it is great! I love it. Thank you.
Awesome, glad you like it. Picasa’s just one of those programs that I can’t say enough good things about. I’ve talked all of my friends and most of my family into using it instead of looking through folder after folder for that one picture that they were searching for.
[…] may have noticed that I’ve neglected to review any real art and design programs other than Picasa (although you could argue that Picasa is more of a photo management application). But, in light of […]
Picasa won’t go commercial market, I doubt it. Almost all of their software is free. They need Picasa so that they can link it to Picasa Web Albums, a service soon-to-be Flickr’s main competition. So far, Flickr is the best of the best, and one of Yahoo’s last “stands”. Normally, Google wants to “knock it down” since it’s really one of Yahoo’s best services.
And of course, to incorporate it into other Google services.
apart from that, a tip from a photographer:
– Rate/Star your favorites,
– Import photos into Picasa, name the folder as descriptive as possible (ie. august holliday with mark and susanne),
– change filenames with batch (F2), also naming them descriptive,
– tag them with keywords (Ctrl+K), use as many keywords as you can think of. First apply globaly to all images (ie. holliday, nature, august, fun, countryside, village…) and then go and select similar groups of pictures and tag them more (ie. all pictures with sussane get “sussane” keyword, all landscapes…). This can be lenghty but is the most important!!
– Geotag photos. For this you need Google Earth installed. Basically, you drag your photos to where they where shot at. It’s not essential, but should be done if possible, for future. And Picasa Web Albums display map location of photos, so it’s cool
– Make your basic adjuctments. Crop, rotate, contrast etc.
– Add captions to those photos you think need it.
This process should be done every time you import new photos.
So, where’s that photo of your sister made a few years ago, she was at some party (in a wonderful dress), having some silly hat.
“Umm… maybe it’s in partyyy2 under old-photos… or in temp of _dsc19284 folder, not sure”.
Type sister, party, dress, hat and have that photo in a sec. Jump to realtime location on G-Earth, and read the caption/what was that silly hat really about.
[…] and only take a few seconds to do some major tweaks. Not as quick as Photoshop [review] or Picasa [review] - but certainly fast […]
Thank you so much for recommending Picassa. I love it and use it on a daily basis. It’s so easy to navigate and impossible to believe that it’s free! I’m not a big photographer, so I don’t need Adobe Photoshop…Picassa is perfect if you want to speedily send pictures through email.
[…] you’ve read some of my other reviews, you know that I hold Photoshop [review] and Picasa [review] in very high esteem. Photoshop is all about image editing power and can dominate every […]