Picasa2 Review

Several years ago Google bought Picasa from the original team that developed the software. Since their purchase, the popularity of the program has grown exponentially and the capabilities of the program have expanded as well. The current version, Picasa2 is so useful that for amateur and new digital photographers, it's the only software I recommend. And best of all, it's still free!

About Picasa2
Essentially, Picasa2 is a software program that allows you to store, organize, edit, print, share and archive your photographs. Picasa2 is what I refer to as a "jack of all trades" of software. If you have a digital camera and want to make your photos useful, Picasa2 is all you need. But there's more to the phrase: "Jack of all trades, master of none." Picasa2 does a good job of most things, but it's not the most robust program out there.

My favorite feature of Picasa2 is its ability to organize photos. When you install Picasa2 you can tell it where to find your photos. It imports them into the application and begins indexing them. You can easily scroll through thousands of photos without any major lag in the program. Early versions of Picasa seemed slow, but I have many, many thousand photos on my computer now and Picasa2 handles them ably. You can put captions on your photos, rate them with stars, categorize them specifically, email them to your friends, upload them to web pages and burn them to CD, all from within the program.

Picasa2's main shortcoming is when it comes to editing. Picasa2 provides one-touch editing of most features, and lets you perform red-eye corrections, which is important especially for amateur photographers who use P&S digital cameras that are famous for catching red eyes. The problem is that the one touch editing features don't allow you to finesse any of the editing functions. You click the button for "sharpen" and you get the amount of sharpening that Picasa2 gives you. If you want any real control over your editing, you'll need to edit your photos in another program specifically for image editing.

Cat's Bottom Line
Every member of my family who owns a digital camera has Picasa2 on their computer. I've made sure of that, because it's the easiest thing for all of my family members to use. They're all very happy with Picasa2, because it is made for the amateur photographer who doesn't want to spend a lot of time playing around in editing software. If you want a comprehensive solution and you don't want to spend a lot of time editing pictures, Picasa2 is for you. If you want to be able to seriously edit your photos, I still recommend Picasa2 as an organizer and "distributor" of pictures (via email, the web, a blog, etc.) but you'll need to supplement the application with another image editing program.

http://www.picasa.com