Picasa 3 3.9

Having lots of pictures on your hard drive can get problematic at some point. With the advent of digital photography, people no longer have the care they once had when cameras were holding 24 shot film rolls. Imagine, there was a time when you actually had to take care how many pictures you would take and then make a trip to a photo shop (no, not that one) to get them developed in 24 hours. What you got was precious and you would carefully place them in photo albums. That's no longer the case at all. On the contrary, people take dozens of photos, not caring about space limitations and then dump the memory card onto some obscure folder that then they transfer onto an external drive some months later. If you know what I'm talking about, then you know that any sensible photographer should have an image manager installed on his or her computer.

Everything seems to be in order...

Picasa 3 is a desktop application. When you first launch it (and at every subsequent launch), Picasa will search your hard drives for pictures and videos and then create a collection, just like a music manager would do with your mp3 collection. From then on, you will get fast access to any visual media item you wish. Folders that contain pictures are arranged in a list or tree while their contents can be explored in the main view as thumbnails. From there you can do a lot of things.

As a selection method, you can hold the Control key and click on multiple images which will be also displayed on the bottom. Selected pictures can be held so that they do not get deselected when you go on selecting other items. Conversely, you can remove held items or clear the selection entirely.

What the user should know before exploring the edit functions of Picasa is that pictures and videos are treated as original source and will never be deleted or overwritten through the user's actions. Any modification brought to a file will create a new version that Picasa will store in addition to the original. That is important since you can perform drastic edits and batch edits quite easily, with no confirmation prompts.

Picasa allows sharing of photos via email or to upload to your Google+ account. It can also print or export selections to specific folders, which makes it much easier to transfer files onto a USB stick or something similar. Picasa can filter pictures by size, face recognition or different types of tags. This is done across the entire collection or within smaller parameters.

Features

• Automatic detection of media files
• Varied batch selection methods
• Image editing and batch editing
• Backup profiles
• Google Earth tagging
• Album settings
• Uploading to Google+

Pros

• Total control over your image collection
• Pleasant interface

Cons

• Might take a while to discover features useful to you.*

*Yeah, that's no real con. I know, but what else could I say?

Conclusion

Picasa 3 is a great tool for managing your picture or video collections and also for sharing them with the outside world. If you are a Google user, then you will find Picasa as an integral part of your digital experience.