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Picasa – Photo software that is free

Picasa is free software from Google for managing photos both on your computer and on a website. With it you can

• Locate and organize all the photos on your computer.
• Edit and add effects to your photos.
• Share your photos with others through email, prints, and on the web (see mine at http://picasaweb.google.com/gs777bs).

In brief, Picasa functions this way. During the installation process, you tell it where to look for the pictures on your computer. It then compiles a database of the photos. (Don’t tell it to look everywhere; you will end up with a mess because it will find images from programs that you don’t want in your Picasa album. Before installing, I would suggest gathering all your photos under a main directory, with sub-folders underneath this main folder. Then tell Picasa to look in that one folder. As you add more pictures under that main directory, Picasa will add them into its database.) There are some basic tools for cropping and making other modifications to the photos.

When you have a photo you like and want to share it with others, you can upload it to the Picasa web site. You have to have a Google account for this. As you upload a photo, you tell it which on-line album you want it in. Your on-line organization can be different from the way it is on your computer. Or you can email a photo to a friend or relative directly from Picasa, but that may require a gmail email address.

Regarding Comments on photos: I just read at the Picasa site that when you add a comment to a photo with Picasa, the comment is actually stored with the photo. I used for a brief time an early version of Photoshop Album. I added a lot of comments to photos only to discover that they were stored independently of the photos. When I stopped using Photoshop Album, I lost all the comments and notes. Argh!

Read more about Picasa. The software is free to download and use.