Google's Picasa Application

I was very much impressed in the enhancements to the Google's Picasa program which I had to go back and review again for the article that I just finished for the Laurel Mountain Post. I reinstalled it on my Vista Desktop at home and it automatically found all the images I had on the local machine. I then redirected it to the Network Storage Drive I have setup and Bingo! it found all of those pictures for me as well. The Picasa interface is simple and easy to use and they have added quite a few enhancements that allow you to edit your images, post them to Google's Picasa site, create a self playing CD with the Picasa software on it to pass along your pictures to friends and family and to create a movie/slide show as well.

You need two things to get started. First and Internet account, and second, a Google account. With Google everything centers around having a Google Email account so if you don't have one go ahead and set one up. It is free so even if you decide not to use if for your general email, you can use it for all the other Google Apps that require know who you are. Click here to setup your own account. Once you have established your account go to Picasa's site to download the application.

As you can see in the picture on the right the program interface is simple and straight forward. The program once it installs will automatically search your local storage drives for pictures and will set them up in folders. The first time you send your pictures to the web you will be asked for you associated GMail information and once you enter that everything flows from there. If you have a lot of pictures and you want to use this space as a backup for you files you will want to upgrade your storage capacity. For $20 per year Google will give you 10Gbytes storage that is shared between your email, Picasa and Google docs locations. If you plan to be real active in all of these three sites and you have more than 10Gbytes of photos and videos you can go to the next level. The only problem that I see here is that you are given around 6GB by GMail and 1GB by Picasso for free anyway and the $20 is just giving 3GB to be shared between applications. If you are going to buy the extra space you may want to consider starting out at the 40GB level.

Picasa's import function seems to be slow if you have movies on your camera. It appears to read the file before it will give you the thumbnails of the contents of the the device for import selection and since movies are typically very large compared with snapshots the process takes a long time. Since the program has to read the entire contents of your memory cartridge before you begin to pick and choose what to import this takes time as well. Once it is up you can preview and choose the images you want to bring in. Using the Shift or Ctrl Key you can pick and choose which pictures you want to import. A button on the bottom begins the import process.  You get a dialog box that allows you to enter the directory to store the images, Meta Data for Date, Location and Description and the ability to delete the pictures off of the card when you are importing.

Once you have the images on your system, you will have many options to choose from to work and view your images. You can pick and choose a selection from same or different folders to produce a slide show, push the images to your Internet Picasa Storage Area or publish a GIFT CD to give out to friends and family. You can place a star on photos to select them as favorites and they will automatically be placed in a star folder as well that you can show in a slide show or produce a CD. If you right mouse click on a photo you have many options that you apply to picture very quickly, including, moving to a new folder, publishing to your Website, making it a screen saver, rotating the image and even deleting it from your system if you are getting rid of the "BAD ONES".

I have put together a little video overview of the image manipulation functions that you can access here: Picasa Video Overview