product review: Picasa

Picasa is the digital photo management software from Google Inc. This product is available for free download from the Google's website. Picasa is one the best products in the market which can be used to manage digital pictures, videos, organize them, sort them and what not.
Google acquired Picasa from Idealabs in mid 2004, and applied the Google's magic onto it,now it is the part of the Google's goodies package. It has a sleek and glossy interface with graceful transition effects and fade downs, on loading and other refreshes. Picasa is available for the various platforms such as Windows XP, Vista, and beta versions for Linux flavours and Mac OSX. The latest version out in market is Picasa 2.5.

FEATURES
Simplicity is the main standout of this product. It is very easy to use. You can import images virtually from any device, you digital camera, mobile phone, or remote PC and Picasa will add it to the image library. Image library is very well organized and can be viewed as folders or tree stucture. You can also sort the library the way you like. The light weight process Picasa Media detector adds every new picture that enters your hard disk directly onto the library. The process does not eat up CPU time. Other features includes the Slideshow and Gift CD creator. You can also search pictures easily, and add tags to each image, or even rate them with "stars".
The timeline feature is a really creative idea by Google. It creates a three dimensional spiral of folders in your library chronologically sorted. You can select your "era" you want to explore. It turns you photo viewing into an amazing experience. Other such features include Geotag which lets you tag your pictures geographically with Google Earth. You can also find and remove duplicate copies of same pictures. You can create a collage, poster, slideshow, or video from the albums, or even publish a web album or blog from it. You can even e-mail or send the pictures to hello.

IMAGE EDITING
Image editing in Picasa yet again impressed me to say the least. It has excellent features right from red eye removal, adding light to dark pictures, adjusting shadows and highlights, auto adjust contrast or brightness etc. You can also tune the color temperature and add effects like sepia, tint, glow, film grain etc. The best part of the editing is that the original picture is always backed up and even if something goes awry you can get back the original. You can even forget saving the changes to the actual image file. Each time you open Picasa you can see the touched up picture while on disk the picture is still raw. I could easily touch up pictures I took from my digital camera within minutes, which otherwise would have taken me hours with Photoshop. But to my surprise the quality of edit is very much high and comparable to that of Photoshop edits.

before editing after editing

That is not a joke, that is how effective the filters in Picasa are.

PULL DOWNS
To be frank, I could find anything serious which is really annoying with Picasa. Even though I don't like unwanted programs residing in my system tray, Picasa Media detector still found its place there, as I never felt any system load because of it. The only thing which I can argue of being a bit annoying is that, for each folder that Picasa scans and adds to its library, Picasa creates an .ini file in that folder. My system has a several hundreds of them. But otherwise Picasa consumes very less disk space, so this can be tolerated.
To sum up, Picasa is one of the better softwares I have come across in recent past. More amazingly it is offered free of cost. This is a must have for every home PC user.

SNEAK PEEK
In late 2006, Google acquired another technology from Neven Vision which can be used to recognize faces and search them from the pictures. Google has promised to add this feature to Picasa soon. As a matter of fact, Neven Vision has won several awards for its face recognition technology. So it is going to be even more exciting in the near future.

Rating

Website http://picasa.google.com
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