Picasa - make the most of your digital photography for free!
The advent of digital photography has done something amazing for cupboards across the globe. You remember those boxes of holiday snapshots that just lay there waiting to be put into albums or the hours that you spent vetting, selecting the best ones and then lovingling (painstakingly?) pasting them into albums, don't you?
Well, digital photography has revolutionised that process by moving those boxes from your cupboards onto harddrives and CDs/DVDs. It has also resulted in an explosion in the number of pictures people take. As people no longer have to wait for photos to be develop or, for that matter, pay for them to be developed, they have gone crazy. Why worry about composition or setting up the right shot when you can take ten and then delete the unsuitable ones.
While this may have enabled even the amateur photography to get at least one decent shot out of every ten taken, it has left flashes burnt on innumerable retinas and hard disks jammed with images. It actually may have made people cherish snapshots of special events and holiday moments less, because they are so easy to create and require very little effort.
Well, you could spend money on programes like Adobe's Photo Album and other similar commercial programmes or you could try it with inferior freeware versions to try an make some order out of the jumble mess of phots on your hard drive to give you photo collections a bit more value. However, Google in it's quest for domination of the world of digital and online organisation has come up with a solution that I think almost every digital photographer (from the basic to intermediate) will love.
The programme is called Picasa and can be downloaded free from the internet. It has a simple interface that allows you to organise your pictures into albums (linked to a folder structure on your hard drive). I have about 2000 photos on my hard drive and was able to organise them in an evening. You can give each image a tag that contains details of the images name, date it was taken, location and even a short commentry. The software breathes new life into old photos as your can easily print, run slide shows, burn them to CDs/DVDs and, probably the most powerful feature of the software, interface with either Outlook or an online email system (e.g. Gmail) and send photos directly from the system to your friends. It takes care of the formatting and you just provide the address and message. Mothers around the globe rejoice as now it is easier than ever for you backpacking son/daugter living in London to send home images of their lives.
I have recommended this to a number of friends that have either just moved to digital photography or who have stacks of unsorted photos on their computer. Amazingly, every single one has come back with a positive review of the software and with a new zest for capturing the moment on film.
If you aren't familiar with Google's Picasa yet, I recommend you go out and try it. If you aren't impressed, let me know as I imagine you will be in the minority and your feedback is likely to be invaluable to Google. Let's hope that Google don't mess it up by trying to convince us all to store our images on Google's own servers or to share our albums via the Internet....