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Picasa

Download the Picasa Photo Viewing, Editing, and Sharing Application

SUMMARY: Organize your photos, perform color corrections and other effects, and share your pictures with the world with Google's Picasa.

Picasa is a photo viewing, editing, and sharing application from Google, available for the Linux, Macintosh, and Windows platforms. Picasa can organize your photos, allowing you to import pictures from folders on your hard drive, your digital camera, a scanner, or other media. You can also create albums, organizing groups of photos from multiple folders.

Photos can be edited, with options including cropping, straightening, adding text, red-eye fixing, and auto adjusting the contrast and color. You can apply a variety of effects such as Film Grain, Glow, Sepia tone, and Tint. Or, perform more detailed refinements on the fill light, highlights, shadows, and color temperature, with the ability to choose the neutral color.

Browsing photos taken in New York via Picasa

Other options include adding photos to a screensaver, creating a picture collage, e-mailing photos, setting a photo as the Desktop wallpaper, ordering prints, and creating a movie from your photos that can be uploaded to YouTube. Photos can be uploaded to a Blogger account or shared online via Picasa Web Albums.

Note that if you are installing Picasa for Windows, you will be given the option on the first run to make Picasa the default photo viewer.

Performing photo adjustments with Google's Picasa

Picasa is a free download, available at the following URL:

Picasa: http://picasa.google.com/

Note that if you are installing Picasa for Windows, during the install you will be given several options including making Google your default search engine in Internet Explorer and sending anonymous usage statistics. You may wish to keep these options selected; if not, be sure to read the installation dialog boxes and do not just keep hitting "Next".

This tip was written regarding Picasa 3.1.0 running on a Windows Vista machine. Features, information, and screenshots for other versions / operating systems may vary.