Picasa is Google's free photo organizing
Picasa is Google's free photo organizing and sharing software. It enables you to find with instantaneous ease all the pictures and photos stores on your computer. It also has basic one click editing features that enable you to edit, touch up, and apply special effects to your photographs. when you open picasa, it automatically scans through designated folders on your hard disk for new pictures and adds them to your picture library, automatically sorting them by date and displaying them in their respective folders. You can drag-n-drop and rearrange your albums in any manner you wish, and also share your pictures with friends and family via e-mail, or share them instantly via the Hello service, or post them to picasa web albums, or print them, or make gift CDs , or even post them to your blog! Installation and setup Installing and setting up picasa is simple and intuitive. Download and install the latest version from http://picasa.google.com. once picasa is installed, its first task is to scan through your hard disk and find all pictures in various locations. These are all stored by date and grouped in their respective folder. Once scanning is complete, you can access picasa and view, organise, edit and share your pictures. you can use the tools option in the menu to specify various settings. In the folder manager option, which is the same as the add folder to picasa under the File menu, you can specify all the folders that picasa should scan always, that is , every time picasa starts, folders that picasa should scan once, and the folders that should be removed from picasa. Choose each set and apply the desired option. The configure screen saver option enables you to use picasa as the screen saver application. Clicking on the screen saver settings button will enable you to control and decide which pictures should be shown and how they should be displayed in the windows screen saver. with the other options you have advanced and experimental features that enable geo-tagging pictures in Google Earth, publishing via FTP, enabling duplicate files, and searching pictures based on the colours in them. You also have the option to create backup sets back up and burn your picture files to one or more CDs and DVDs. Other options that control how picasa behaves are managed through the Tools>options menu. All these options are self explanatory and intuitive. IMPORTING PICTURES Pictures can be imported from a variety of sources into picasa. These include e-mail, digital camera, camera phone, memory card reader, scanner, webcam, cd or dvd, web pictures, USB drive, and networked folders.
If the device is recognised by Picasa, it can usually be accessed through the import feature. click on the import button at the top left corner. This will open the import section and allow you to access any device that is compatible with picasa. In some cases you may require to reinstall the device drives or get updated software from the device manufacturer to make it compatible with picasa. CDs, USB drives,network folders, and other removable media which show up as folders and drives in windows can be accessed through the folder option in the select device drop down. Picture received via email and from web sites can be saved to folders designated as "scan Always" Tools>folder manager. They will then automatically show up in the respective folders in Picasa. Viewing and organizing Pictures Pictures can be viewed in many ways inside picasa. The first option is to view it as a full screen slide show. click the slide show button at the top of picasa to view the slide show of a particular folder. You can return to picasa at any time by press the key. You can also use the forward and back arrow keys to navigate through the slide show. The normal view in picasa will enable you to view each folder's pitures as re sizable thumbnails. The slider control is used to change the viewing size of the thumbnails. In addition to the above two ways to view pictures, picasa also allows you to view the pictures along a timeline. This can be very interesting if your photo collection spans years. To view the pictures along a timeline, click the timeline button at the top of the screen. pictures can be moved across folders by simply dragging and dropping them into the new location. If you want to rename a file or a group of files, simply select the file and go to picture>Batch Edit>Rename. In the rename files dialog box you can specify a new name for the group of files and whether the date and image resolution should be included in the file name. You can go directly to the folder containing a picture by right clicking on a picture and selecting locate on disk or by pressing ctrl+enter or by clicking on the folder in the viewing pane. Each folder can also optionally have a description, accessed by right clicking on the folder and selecting the Edit Folder description... option you can also search across folders by using the search box on the upper right. Clicking on the arrow buttons shows addtional options that enable you to quickly select starred pictures, movies, and uploaded pictures and to view them within a specific data range. special photos can be starred using the star button, and these will show up in the starred folder, and will also show up instantly when clicking on the starred search.
similar to applying the star to photos that are special, you can also add them to the screen saver folder by selecting the desired pictures and going to create > add to screen saver. This will launch the windows screen saver settings window where you can further configure the settings to run the computer in screen saver mode.