Picasa [review, trick, video.......and more]

Review: About Picasa

2007-06-10T04:01:00.000-07:00

Picasa is a free software download that enables you and your students to find, edit and share all the pictures on your PCs. It also offers the Web Albums feature, which enables you to easily upload photos from your computer to the web for sharing with others.

As a teacher, you'll have to either download the software to each computer your class is using or ask your IT folks to download the software to school servers so that it's accessible to all students. Once downloaded, Picasa automatically locates all pictures on your computer and sorts them into visual albums organized by date, with folder names you'll recognize. You can drag and drop photos to arrange them into albums, and Picasa has a built-in screensaver feature for displaying your photos. Picasa also makes advanced editing simple with one-click fixes and powerful effects.

For use in your classroom, you can organize photos of your class and special events, and make each of your students a photo CD. You can also create Web Albums for students to access from home, and integrate photography into your courses by having kids take lesson-related photos, post them to their Web Albums and present oral reports.

Journalism students can keep all photos for each edition of their newspaper or magazine in one location, so they're easy to see and find. And students of all kinds can use Picasa and Picasa Web Albums to supplement their research and presentations in almost every subject they study. Or, just to organize and share their personal photos with friends and family.

Review: Picasa 2

2007-06-09T07:14:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Picasa is a software program from Picasa Inc. that allows you to manage and organize your digital photos. It also includes additional features such as cropping, red-eye removal, keyword search and slideshow. Hello is a program from the same company which enables instant sharing of photos. It operates as a private picture sharing network that lets you send pictures to friends and family and then chat about the pictures immediately. Together Picasa and Hello offer a unique two-part solution: Picasa organizes all the digital photos on your hard drive and Hello allows you to share them with other people. Are Picasa and Hello the ideal combination for you? Find out in my review.

dowload Picasa 2 click Here

Picasa

Main Screen

When Picasa first runs, it asks if you want to scan the whole hard-drive or select certain folders. I chose the former and it took about an hour for Picasa to scan my 80Gb hard drive, finding 310 albums and 6,429 images in total. An individual album is automatically created for every folder that contains digital photos. You can then organise the albums into individual collections.

Picasa is a very nicely designed software program, with a clean, uncluttered interface which is easy to find your way around. On the left of the main screen is a list of albums containing your photos; on the right thumbnails are displayed for the photos in the currently selected album. The Picture Tray area at the bottom displays all of the individual photos that you have selected, and you can choose to Hold or Clear them. This is quite an important concept in Picasa, because when you choose to print, email, export, order prints or send to Hello, these actions apply to the photos that are currently marked as Hold (shown by a small green dot).

Import

The Import screen allows you to import files from other sources like scanners or digital cameras. You can also specify a particular folder, including from a CD-ROM drive. This is important because it allows you to add files to Picasa that aren't stored on your hard drive e.g. from CD backups.

Timeline

The Timeline is an animated graphical representation of all the photos and albums that are in the currently selected collection. It's quite a stylish way to view your work, but you can only view a small thumbnail version of one photo per album.
Slideshow

Much more useful and equally as good looking is the Slideshow feature, which displays a full screen version of all the photos in a particular album, cycling through them according to the display time that you set. You can easily use this to replace the wallpaper feature in Windows; just open Picasa, pick an album and click the Slideshow button.

Edit Picture

Picasa isn't meant to be the equivalent of Photoshop or even Photoshop Elements; its first and foremost a photo organiser. So although there are some basic tools in the Edit Picture window, such as Red-eye and crop, I'd be inclined to do all of my editing in a program that is designed for it.

Keywords

Keywords is one of the areas of Picasa that could be significantly improved. You can add a new keyword or remove an existing one for a particular photo by selecting the Keywords button in the bottom left of the main screen. Unfortunately that's all you can do. You can't, for example, select an existing keyword from a list, which means that you have to retype or copy and paste the same keyword for other photos. There's also no way to categorise the keywords. You also have to enter them one by one; it would be nice if there was some way of entering a batch of keywords at once.

Print

Similarly the Print function does not rival a dedicated program like the popular Qimage or even something like Epson PhotoQuicker. You can choose to print a Full Page Print, 4x6 print, 3.5x5 print or a contact sheet. And that's about it. One great feature is that Picasa identifies and warns you of any files that will produce a low-quality print i.e. any file that has a low DPI value. This a nice touch that will prevent paper being wasted on poor-quality prints.

Overall

Picasa has obviously been designed by a team who know a lot about user interface design. In terms of looks and ease-of-use, Picasa is a step above the competition. In terms of features, it just needs to go one step further in certain areas, such as the keyword system and print option.

Video: Installing Picasa

2007-06-09T07:03:00.001-07:00

Video: Picasa zoom+ with Gesture

2007-06-09T07:02:00.001-07:00

Video: Create Webalbum with Picasa

2007-06-09T07:01:00.001-07:00

Video: Running Picasa on Mac

2007-06-09T06:59:00.001-07:00

Review: What is Picasa?

2007-06-03T00:37:00.001-07:00

What is it?

Picasa is software that helps you to instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organised by date with folder names that you will recognise. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organised.

Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. Also Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures – you can email, print photos home, make gift CDs, and even post pictures on your own blog.

What does it do?

It allows you do do basic editing quickly and simply and can be used by anyone. Whilst it's not photoshop, it does a wide array of things quickly and easily and is useful addition for event photographers.
What does it cost?Nothing! - It's free from the nice people at Google.
Is it as good as Photoshop? It's a different product; if you want to do quick simple editing then it's great, but Photoshop it's not; however unlike Photoshop it can be used by anyone within minutes!

What features does it offer?

Many, including: Crop, Redeye, Straighten, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour, Adjust Fill Light, Change Highlights, Shadows and Colour Temperature, Sharpen, Sepia, Black & White, Tint, Saturate, Focal Black and White and much more. The main advantage is that these features are simple to perform...

Manual: Picasa - crop your images

2007-06-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

Cropping photos with Picasa

Do you find photo editing software too confusing for you? Words like rasterized, layers, curves, saturation, RGB and etc may not be in every one vocab. Does the your digital camera comes with its own photo editing software CD-rom? I have two cameras which provide their own photo-editing softwares. However it was the camera shop’s sales personnel who highly recommended Picasa from Google to me.

Though I do know how to play around with Adobe Photoshop CS2, Paintshop Pro and also Picture It! (original, licensed software that comes with my original, licensed Microsoft Office Suite ) and other freeware like Irfan View, Photostylist etc etc, I still love Picasa because it is kids’ friendly. All my children, including my three years old toddler know how to manipulate photos with it.

Let’s see what we can do with the crop button. Cropping a photo means trimming it, sort of like take a scissors and cut the part you do not like. Snip, snip off the edges a bit and voila, your photo looks less cluttered and there aren’t ugly objects to distract.

I snapped this random photo this morning while my toddler and I were waiting for my husband to bring the car. We were at the EPF (Employees Provident Fund) office tower. It is located by the sea and my son was standing there along the esplanade.

I like the curves of the and the way my toddler was leaning against them. So, snap, snap like every proud mom would do. But I notice that the proportion isn’t right and the background with the hydrant and the coconut tree trunks plus the lam-posts don’t match the mood.
So, one click with Picasa crop button and I get this.

I read about this 1/3 rule in photos. It means, try to form your photo in the proportion of 1/3. Eg. 1/3 of the sea, 2/3 of the sky. Avoid the 50/50 proportion which is too mundane. Over here, it is one third of the grass (because I can’t go back any further as I want to avoid the stiff, steely, lamp posts) and two third of the pavement which have some nice shadows of coconut leaves.

So, enjoy cropping your photos. With Picasa, you don’t have to worry about making mistakes because you can always “Un-do’ and get back the original picture. What are you waiting for? Go enjoy playing the maestro in the darkroom with Picasa.

Errmmm.....You can download Picasa from this Link!
http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasaweb-current-setup.exe

Manual: Picasa - resize your images

2007-06-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

Resizing Your Pictures

Open Picasa and select the folder that contains the pictures to be resized.

Select the picture (or group of pictures) that you are going to resize and add to the website. The pictures you selected should also be shown in the picture tray at the bottom left corner of the screen.

Click on the File menu and then click on "Export Picture to Folder..."

In the Export to Folder Window, adjust the settings as follows:

a: Location of exported folder. Click on "Browse..." and select your website's folder. If your website has a folder for images, you should select such folder instead.

b:Name of exported folder. Type a name that will help you identify the group of pictures you will resize (picasa will create a folder with that name)

c:Image Size options. This feature allows you to specify the width of the resized pictures. The height will be adjusted proportionally. We recommend the width to be 640 pixels or less. If you are making thumbnails, they should be 150 pixels or less.

d:Image Quality. Lower quality will result in images that load faster. If you are not sure about this feature, just leave the default setting as it is.

Then click OK. The resized pictures will be generated by Picasa.

Review: Picasa Hello

2007-06-02T01:11:00.000-07:00

Hello

Hello is just as well designed as Picasa, with lots of neat touches that show the developers have really thought things through.

The most impressive thing that strikes you when you first use Hello is the sheer speed that it transfers photos from you to your friends, or vice versa. It is configured by default to send smaller versions of your photos, and is a lot quicker and much more instantaneous than emailing them or using something like MSN Messenger. It's also a lot safer, using a private, secure peer-to-peer connection which is only open to people that you invite.

On the left of the main screen is a list of all your Friends. You can add a friend if you know what their Hello login name is, or you can click Invite to send them an email inviting them to download Hello and signup.

On the right is the Chat area, which functions much like any other instant message application, albeit without any Smilies at this point in time (although entering : ) causes a smiley face to fall across your screen!).

Hello integrates pretty seamlessly with Picasa. Click the Send Pictures button, select the photos that you want to share in Picasa, make sure that you select Hold, then click the Send Hello button, and Hello automatically sends those photos to the people that you are currently talking to. You do have to change between the two separate programs as you chat and send photos. I guess that this is because Hello is available separately and you don't have to own Picasa to be able to use it.