Picasa by Google is a MUST for you Digital Camera Owners!
After searching for a software program that would help me organize my digital photos, I have finally found what I have been looking for in Google’s Picasa. I had thought about purchasing the Creative Memories software after seeing my consultant demonstrate it, but decided to try Google’s software for another reason: IT’S FREE! I would have gladly paid for something that does what this software does, but had not yet found what I wanted.
Let me tell you the love story about me and my Picasa download from the beginning. First of all, I went to www.picasa.google.com to download it for free. Once downloaded, I started it right up, and the first thing it did was scan all through my computer and collect all of the digital images. This was a great thing for me since my husband and I both download the images from my camera and we put them in different places on the computer…actually all over the place. Not only did it collect them all, it grouped them together by date. All of year 2006 pictures are grouped within that year, 2005 are all together, and so on. Since I usually name my photo folders by using the date it was downloaded, I can actually look through the images in order from month to month through the years.
Another feature I like is that you can look at the properties of an image, and find out the date it was actually taken, the time of day, the resolution, if flash was used, the focal length, exposure time, aperture, and ISO. Not that I honestly understand all of those things….but some of it is good to know.
You can straighten out a crooked picture, fix lighting issues, and the red eye correction is the best I’ve used (works great when you zoom in, and really get all the red stuff). You can crop pictures, change the color temperature (skin tones can go warmer and colder at the touch of a button), fix shadows, and more. Beyond that, you can change the entire effect of the picture, by changing it to sepia, black and white, or tint the entire picture any color of your choice. You can also do a focal black and white picture. This feature allows you to make the entire image black and white but leave a small area colored. You can also do a focal soft focus feature. This feature allows you to make only a certain part of your picture clear, and then blur everything else.
All in all, I can’t really find anything I don’t like about this program. The one drawback I noticed when it first gathered all the digital images was that it gathered images imprinted on my hard drive, the ones Dell put there, like your start-up page images. You just click on that folder and delete the images from Picasa. That took a few minutes. Another plus is that it automatically grabs any images I put on my computer from now on. Check it out…..it will be so worth it. I’ve been showing it to everyone who comes over!