Organizing my images with Picasa
Picasa is a free, downloadable software package offered by Google. While still in its developmental phase, Picasa nonetheless offers many powerful tools allowing you to organize, manipulate, and modify the images stored on your computer’s hard drive.
Because Picasa organizes your images chronologically regardless of their location, it becomes not only easier to compare the volume of images created from one month/ year to the next, which can be useful if you are in a business environment and need to inventory your images, but also to simply find files that you may not have remembered were there. Essentially, instead of having to go through your hard drive searching for stray images, you have only to install Picasa, and the work will be done for you.
Picasa combines tools previously found in separate programs, such as the slide show creation of PowerPoint, for example, and the photo manipulation of Photoshop. You won’t get anywhere near the quantity and sophistication of specialized tools found in the aforementioned programs, but Picasa’s interface is both intuitive and easy to use, and allows you to perform surprisingly powerful actions without any prerequisite knowledge.
Also, don’t overlook the fact that Picasa is free, thus potentially saving you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Finally one big plus to keep in mind is that Picasa is, after all, a Google product. So it has many built-in methods for getting your photos online. Tasks such as creating a Web album, emailing images, or even adding them to a blog can be performed at the click of a button.
Getting Your Photos in Focus with Picasa
Once installed, Picasa will ask you whether you want it to scan your hard disk for photos and organize them. If you choose not to let it do this, you will have the option of importing any photos left out at a later time. Picasa’s ability to scan your hard disk for photos and organize them for you is one of its most powerful applications.
The process can take a few minutes, depending on how many photos you have stored, but once it has completed its task, you will find yourself staring at an attractive interface with your photos and other digital image files displayed next to a sidebar on the left indicating the location of the photos you are currently viewing. You can even click on the folder name above the photos to open a new window to the actual files on your computer.