Picasa software, now Picasa 3, is a powerful photo organizer and also offers extensive editing features.




Picasa 3.5 is the newest version of Picasa. The main new features of this latest version is face recognition, geotargeting and the ability to upload images from your camera, camera phone, media card, etc. directly to Picasa Web Albums. Personally, I find this last new feature the most interesting. Almost everything else remains the same for editing your photos.

You must download Picasa 3 since it is software that must be installed on your computer. Picasa Web Album is a place to store and share photos. This is a website and you must have or create a Google account.

You can use just the Picasa software or only the Web Album. However, using both of them allows you to easily coordinate the two locations. This has certain advantages. As an example, you might want to create an album of certain photos on your computer and then upload it to the Picasa Web Album site, where you can easily share your photos.

I particularly like the feature that synchronizes the album at both locations.

If you are used to using Windows XP to store and organize your photos, Picasa 3 has another very nice feature. You can select photos from various folders to make an album. Of course you can do the same thing in XP by just creating a new folder and copying and pasting. But Picasa 3 makes it much easier.

Please visit my page on Picasa 3 to read my review. You can also go to my page on Picasa Photo Editing.

In either Picasa 3 or Picasa Web Albums, you can order prints from a photo printing service. There are quite a few to choose from. Picasa will then upload your photos for printing. Both offer a variety of ways to share your photos. I found the different options satisfied most situations.

Another thing I like about Picasa 3 is the option to create watermarks on your photos. Watermarks protect your photos and Picasa made it very easy to do. There is a wide variety of other editing tools, divided into three different categories. You will probably find yourself using just a few of them, but if you want to explore, the tools are there. I mostly use Crop, Saturate, Sharpen, and Fill Light (this is a good one as it lightens up dark images). For more detailed information, please visit some of the other pages I have written on Picasa.