Quick Tips on Using Picasa
My wife make full use of Picasa to put my daughter’s picture into her blog. So I decided to share with you all about this great image software.
What is Picasa?
Picasa is a software application for organizing and editing digital photos, originally created by Idealab and now owned by Google. ‘Picasa’ is a multi-wordplay on the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso plus the phrase “mi casa” for “my house” and “pic” pictures (personalized art). The icon and logo is a stylized house formed by the aperture blades of a photographic lens. In July 2004, Google began offering Picasa for free download.
Picasa is software that helps you to instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names that you will recognize.
You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.
Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. Also Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures – you can email, print photos home, make gift CDs, and even post pictures on your own blog.
Picasa 2 is free from Google to download . Organize your digital photo album with the free Google Pack.
What does Picasa do?
It allows you do do basic editing quickly and simply and can be used by anyone. Whilst it’s not photoshop, it does a wide array of things quickly and easily and is useful addition for event photographers.
What does it cost?
Nothing! - It’s free from the nice people at Google.
Compare to Photoshop?
It’s a different product; if you want to do quick simple editing then it’s great, but Photoshop it’s not; however unlike Photoshop it can be used by anyone within minutes!
What features does it offer?
Many, including: Crop, Redeye, Straighten, Auto Contrast, Auto Color, Adjust Fill Light, Change Highlights, Shadows and Color Temperature, Sharpen, Sepia, Black & White, Tint, Saturate, Focal Black and White and much more. The main advantage is that these features are simple to perform…
Picasa Wordpress Widget
Picasa wordpress widget is a wordpress plugin which allows users to publish random photos from picasa albums on their blogs.
Quick Tips
Google’s Picasa is probably one of the best photo managers available as it makes organizing, managing and sharing photos a lot easier. Its ever growing popularity can be attributed to its simplicity and ease of use. Picasa 2 is currently available as a download for Windows and Linux but a Mac version is expected to be released soon.
Here are some tips for Picasa users to efficiently manage their photo collections:
1. Tag your Photos using Keywords
Select a few photos (Use CTRL + Click), and press CTRL + K to add keywords to your photos. This could help a lot in sorting through and finding a photo later.
2. Upload Photos to Flickr from Picasa
Ok, you can obviously upload your pictures to Picasa Web Albums from Picasa, but what if Flickr is your favourite? You cannot use Picasa to upload photos to Flickr, but there’s a third party tool to the rescue.
Picasa2Flickr is how it’s called, and it adds a ‘Send To Flickr’ button to Picasa. Click it, authorize and then you can upload photos to Flickr directly from Picasa.
3. Batch Edit Photos
If you want to edit multiple photos at once in Picasa, use CTRL + Click to select them all. Then, use the option Pictures >> Batch Edit from the menu bar to apply effects to all the photos you’ve selected.
4. Publish to Blogger, Export as HTML Pages
In addition to uploading your photos to your Picasa Web Albums, Picasa makes it easy to upload your photos to a blog hosted on Google’s Blogger Service. Use the options from the Tools menu to share your photos with others on your Blogger Blog.
Picasa can also make HTML Gallery pages for you locally, you can share them around computers. It’s only easier to browse the photos in your browser. Use the Create menu to export photos as HTML Gallery Pages.
5. Gift CD with only selected Photos
There’s only one possibility when creating Gift CDs in Picasa: you can only add an entire folder to a gift CD, not particular photos. There’s a work around though, here’s how:
Do this for the photos you don’t want to be included in the gift CD: Right Click on the photos you want to exclude and select Hide from the menu that appears. Once you’ve done this for all the photos, press the Gift CD option on the toolbar to burn a disk only with those specific photos.
6. Make a Photo Black and White
Five detailed procedures to create black and white copies of your photos are nicely explained here.
7. Faster Zooming
When you’re viewing a single photo in Picasa, you can zoom into the photo by using your mouse’s scroll wheel. Or, there’s an even quicker way to zoom: use the left mouse button, draw a diagonal line across the photo, and it gets bigger instantly.
8. Full Screen Photo Viewing
Put your cursor over a photo, press CTRL and then ALT. A full screen view of the picture is shown immediately.
9. Picasa Shortcuts
Picasa has got shortcuts for almost every other action, you can see a list here. Make sure you master them. They could really come handy. Some of my favorites are:
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Ctrl-A: Select all photos in album
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Ctrl-1: View your photos as small thumbnails
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Ctrl-2: View your photos as large thumbnails
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F11: Use Picasa in full-screen mode
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Ctrl-4: Start a slideshow
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Ctrl-3: Open an image in “Edit Mode”
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Ctrl-Shift-H: Flip image horizontally
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Ctrl-Shift-V: Flip image vertically
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Ctrl-Shift-B: Add black and white effect
(By) Shankar Ganesh, a 16 year old Student and Freelance Writer from India. He blogs about computers and software at Killer Tech Tips.
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Comments
[...] an image editing tool. Lankapo has some quick tips to share regarding the usage of Picasa. Fancy yourself a Picasa newbie? Some quick tips won’t hurt I [...]
Uhh, i completely forgot Picasa has such tools to play with. I deleted it awhile back (or was it that i never reinstalled it after a format) and only reinstalled it a few days ago for the collage function. Love the poloroid and grid effect, if only they had others to use. Do you know if we can download extra collage functions?
Definitely a much better alternative to Photoshop for those simple photo tweaks. PS takes up so much memory even while doing simple tasks. One think i especially like about Picasa is its clean look, like what you’d see on Macs. And even when it’s searching for images, it doesn’t feel like much memory is being taken up.
BYE!
p.s. I replied you on Facebook and Entrecard by the way.
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shawn,
thanks for your comment,definitely agree with you on comparison with PS. its much faster and easy to use. even my wife can use it within hours heheh
p/s extra collage function ? I am not sure but I will try to search it
Thanks for sharing, maybe i’ll check it out sometime.
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Cool Picasa. Hello Azlan..I have another tag for you..hope you don’t mind again. As easy as copy paste lol! Have a great weekend. 
I love Picasa but never quite figured out how to use it the way you have. Great stuff!
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You try to get some adsense money from promoting Google Pack.
Nice try!
LOL