The Triangle

Issue date: 3/4/05 Section: Sci-Tech

Media Credit: The Triangle Kaushal Toprani

Owning a digital camera provides the easiest way to capture any moment. In fact, if you or your friends own one, there are probably hundreds of photos with friends just sitting around or posing for the camera. To go along with the two hundred pictures of people sticking their tongue out at the camera, digital camera owners have hundreds of pictures from various events - weddings, picnics, sporting events, birthdays, you name it ­­­­­- anything. The ease of digital photography has made photography fun for anyone. However, with all these pictures, users need a way to organize them.

That's where everyone's favorite search company comes to the rescue. Google's Picasa 2 offers an easy way to organize your pictures. Picasa doesn't stop at organization either; there are at least another 30 features for users to play with. Best of all, its free!

After running the three megabyte setup file from http://www.picasa.com, Picasa scans the hard drive for all image files. By doing this, Picasa can find pictures that you forgot you even had. The initial scan may take several minutes, but it is well worth the wait. After the scan, Picasa groups the pictures in the same folder together and sorts them by time. Each folder becomes an album. When you add pictures to your computer in the future, Picasa will find and sort them with the rest of your pictures in a matter of seconds. The interface for Picasa is excellent. Down the left side of the screen, the albums are listed in chronological order, and can be grouped by year of creation date, latest revision date, or folder name. One of my few complaints with Picasa is that it does not let you sort by folder directory and sub-directory, thereby letting users keep their existing organization structure, if they so desire. In the main frame, the albums are presented as contact sheets - thumbnails of the images, side-by-side in the album. Picasa even gives you the flexibility to control the size of the thumbnails.

Scrolling through the albums in the main frame might be a little difficult at first; it is not done in the usual Windows fashion. Clicking anywhere on the upper half of the scroll bar scrolls the page up, clicking anywhere on the lower half scrolls the page down. It takes a little getting used to.

Media Credit: http://www.best-digital-photos.com Picasa´s timeline allows you to automatically view photos in chronological order.

The timeline is a nice little feature of Picasa. Albums are shown in chronological order, three dimensionally. Rather than listing the names of the album, one of the pictures in the album is an icon representing the album. Clicking on an icon will bring that part of the timeline front and center. A horizontal scroll bar at the bottom also provides an easy way to navigate the timeline of your pictures.

Of course, Google's picture organization software would make searching and categorizing your pictures easier. Picasa lets users apply labels and keywords to their pictures using journalist's IPTC standard, meaning the keywords are saved within the picture's file. You can search for pictures and Picasa will return results based on keywords and album names. Picasa users can apply a star rating to their pictures, as well. Also, with a few clicks of a button, users can create archive CDs or DVDs of their digital moments. Picasa also offers features to move pictures to different folders, media, and devices.

After getting your pictures organized, the real fun with Picasa begins. Picasa offers basic editing tools to perfect your digital masterpieces. Picasa lets users crop, straighten, adjust color, adjust contrast, remove red eye, and play with the lighting. Additionally, Picasa comes with a whole set of special effects. It comes with various filters that let you convert your images to black and white, apply tints, play with the focus, as well as others. Picasa won't bore advanced camera users either, it can show camera information as well as a RGB (red, green, blue) histogram of the intensity of colors.

Sharing pictures is one of the strongest features of Picasa. Want to show off your pictures on your own computer to a visiting relative? No more fumbling with Microsoft viewers to browse through your pictures, Picasa creates amazing, full screen slideshows and movies that can be put to music via MP3. These slideshows are burnable to CD using the "Gift CD" option. You can really help your friends out by checking the "Include Picasa" box when burning their CDs.

Media Credit: Picasa Picasa makes organizing and photos simple, with thumbnail views of the pictures contained in each folder.

In addition to making slideshows effortless, putting pictures up on the web is incredibly easy. Using the "Export as Web Page" option lets beginners choose from six different, professional, clean templates. With a few clicks of a button a webpage complete with thumbnails and links is ready for uploading. Advanced users can have Picasa output XML code for future editing.

Making webpages is not the only way Picasa lets you share pictures over the web. Click "Email" and Picasa can send pictures via email using Mozilla Thunderbird, Google's Gmail, or Picasa Mail. When using the Gmail function, you can email up to ten megabytes of pictures to anyone without leaving the Picasa interface.

Picasa Mail is part of Picasa's sister program Hello. Hello claims to let users share pictures instantly and securely over any connection. It is setup like an instant messaging client, letting you send pictures to other users and then chatting about them. Hello also lets you publish pictures to a Blogger account.

On top of the organizing, editing, and sharing options, Picasa also offers many printing and publishing features. The screensaver feature lets you publish custom screensavers for your computer. Blending pictures together in various ways is possible with the collage feature. For example, you can place pictures together like a quilt or have Picasa make them look like a pile of Polaroids. The poster feature is excellent for printing pictures larger than one sheet of paper. If you wanted to print a picture four times the size of an eight and half by 11 sheet of paper, Picasa will print each quadrant of the picture on one sheet of paper. In addition, you can print out pictures in various sizes from wallets to full page. Also, Picasa makes it easy to print out contact sheets of albums. If you don't have a high quality photo printer, Picasa offers easy ways to order prints from Shutterfly, Kodak's Ofoto, Walmart Photo Center, or Snapfish. Picasa even offers to make pictures compatible for TiVo!

Picasa offers a ton of flexibility with images for its users. Created by search giant Google, it makes organizing photos painless. Picasa takes the next step by letting users make basic edits to their pictures, like cropping and adjusting light. Users are given a multitude of options for sharing like creating slideshows, webpages, or using the Hello client. To top it off, Picasa makes getting prints of pictures simple. Picasa is a complete image software that gives users many tools and features for free.



Kaushal Toprani is a sophomore majoring in information systems.

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