Picasa Web

I thought I’d look into something different tonight, I use Picasa (www.picasa.com) now part of Google as it is unbelievably quick when it comes to uploading photos for sharing on the web, I also like the ability to choose various digital printing services, and so on. I must look into whether or not this is a good place to leave instructions for friends, family and clients on how to get the most out of Picasa and their digital photos.

So what is so good about Picasa… well, first of all it is not entirely online so there is no need to upload acres of photos. You only need to upload the ones you want.

If you download and install Picasa it’ll ask you if it can search your whole computer or just the most obvious places where you might keep photos i.e. the My Photos folder if you are using Windows XP or Vista.

Next, you’ll be presented with all your photos in thumbnail format structured according to how your filing system. Again this is nice because you don’t have to rearrange everything because the software tells you to. To much software these days is dictatorial and it should be the other way around.

So you can see your thumbnails, you can expand and view and slideshow of one alumn at a time, you can also eliminate red-eye, crop and do all the usual things that probably your digital camera software can do as well.

The real benefit of Picasa is in the row of buttons along the bottom of the screen, these are self explanitory to a large extent and also extremely easy to use. The website albums offer 250mb of free space to get you started, this allows sharing of about 3-400 photos without any problem. The Picasa website also allow you to make make public your ablums or to keep them private.

The email button just takes the stress out of sending photos by email, no more resizing, cropping and worrying if the file size is going to be too big for the recipient. And then comes the gem of the program, the Print button.

With so many different papers, options, sizes, types, this button takes all that pain and effort way, you just select exactly how many photos you want on a given piece of paper and off you go.

The order prints button is easy, you get a range of different services so you are not stuck with one. No more using the Kodak service with that Kodak camera, in fact welcome to the world of digital printing it is all too easy.

The last three buttons don’t need so much detail, they work they are easy and they are available. There is however 1 other button that is worth noting. The ‘Gift CD’ button located near the top. To easy really.

Enough ranting about Picasa, I just wanted to give friends, family and clients a brief overview of what can be done using it. Also of course take a look at our photos online.