Looking for a way to share photos online with your friends or relatives? With the popularity of digital cameras, gone are the days of shoeboxes of photos in the backs of closets and half-finished photo albums. Instead, the computer has become central in the storage of memories. And since pictures take up space on your hard drive, you have to find yet another solution to the problem of photo storage.
Picasa is the answer
Google Picasa is free online photo management software that lets you store, edit, and share photos online from your PC without worrying about running out of space. But Picasa isn’t simply a place to store your photos. The features of Picasa make you feel like you have a whole photo lab at your fingertips!
When you use Picasa, the software automatically locates all your pictures and sorts them into folders. Once you share photos online, you can organize them into albums in any way you want. This makes it easy for you to find photos you want to share, and reorganize your pictures whenever and however you want.
To further organize your pictures, you can “tag” them. Tagging simply means you write words or short phrases to remind you what’s in the picture or what it’s about. Then, if you want to find some pictures with “Dear Aunt Martha” in them, you can use that tag to find pictures.
Once the pictures are organized, Picasa lets you edit your photos. But Picasa goes beyond simple red-eye removal, which is already easy since Picasa’s software automatically detects and corrects red eyes in your pictures. There is a Retouch tool that lets you improve photo quality and get rid of blemishes. It helps your photos look more professional, and makes you proud to share photos online with friends and family. The Retouch tool can also help you improve printed photos you’ve scanned to your PC by removing scratches, marks, or water stains.
Cropping your pictures is, of course, available, and Picasa makes a suggestion for cropping based on the composition of your photo. There are ten different dimensions to choose from, and then you can preview your cropped photo before applying the changes.
To customize your pictures, Picasa allows you to add a watermark or text to the pictures, and even print them with the watermark or text. This is a great feature for photographers who want to make sure they get credit for their work, or for adding information for albums and scrapbooks. There is also a Captions tool in Picasa that allows you to print your pictures with the photo file names or captions on or below the picture.
For people who like to create collages, Picasa has six different collage types to play with, and gives you control over the content and layout for your collage. You select the photos, and you can move and resize them until they’re in the perfect place. You can also adjust how much space is between the images, and use an image as a background, or select a color for the background.
One of the great additions to Picasa is the ability to combine your photos, videos, and music into movies, or to use the editing room to polish and perfect your existing videos. This helps you customize your pictures even further, and can be a great, unique way to share your pictures with friends and family.
You can also use your Picasa albums to create a screensaver for your computer, letting you look at your favorite pictures even when you’re not on Picasa. When you create the screensaver, you choose the sources the pictures are coming from, even using your Photo feeds to add to the screensaver.
If you waren’t sure how to share photos with your friends on the web before, sharing memories is now easier than ever with Google Picasa. Once you create and customize your online albums, all you have to do is email the album’s link to friends and family without worrying about if the photo attachments are too large to send the email. To share an album, all you have to do is click the “Share” button on the right side of the folder or album header, choose who gets the album, add a message, and your pictures are sent!
Picasa has revolutionized storing, editing, and sharing your pictures. The whole process is streamlined to make it as easy as possible for you to share photos online. Let Picasa store your pictures, so all you have to focus on is making memories!
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