Chuck The Geek.com

Picasa - Email and share your photos on the web the right way

September 8th, 2007 by Chuck Sharp

I’ve mentioned Picasa before on this blog. I’ve talked about how easy it is to find and edit photos on your computer, import the pics, and then how slide shows can making viewing the photos a pleasure. Today I want to share what picasa can do to help you share your photos with your friends.

My wife and I religously use this program to email photos. We use it for email because it makes every step very easy:

1. It sends from a Gmail account seamlessly.
2. It has instant access to your Gmail’s address book.
3. You can flag several pictures for email with one click by just “holding” them in Picasa’s tray.
4. BEST FEATURE: it will scale your photos to a reasonable size that you pick automatically.

It’s as easy as one can make it, and I don’t know of any other program that does it anywhere near as well.

A feature I’ve only recently played with is Picasa’s web albums. Your Gmail account gives you an additional 1 GB of free space for Picasa online photo albums. That allows for a lot of pictures. More space can be purchased if needed, but I think that 1 GB will go a very long way.

Uploading to a web album is as easy as emailing. Just hold the pictures in the picture tray, then click on the “Web Album” button. You can give the picture album a name, or choose an existing album to upload to. Every album can be designated private to friends or public to anyone with the web album URL. All picture captions are automatically given to the album pictures, and they show up as the picture’s title. Once uploaded, you can change the picture list order and several other options.

Picasa makes complex things easy, and makes playing with pictures fun. If you don’t use Picasa, or only use it for photo organizing, then you’re missing out on the fun of Picasa’s social features.

Technorati Tags: Picasa, Photos, free software, software reviews

Entry Filed under: PC Basics, Productivity, Review