Picasa

Description:  Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great and is easy to use.

Material Covered: Downloading Picasa, editing photos, making photo collages, emailing photos, exporting photos and making slide shows with music.

What I learned:  Picasa is easy to use, just as advertised. It organizes all the photos on your computer so they are easy to find and edit. With this program I was able to edit, add effects, and make photo collages within hours of downloading the program. I think this is a great program and it is free. I currently use Photoshop for my photo editing and creating effects and it is an amazing program. Photoshop takes weeks and months to learn and is very expensive. Within minutes of watching the Picasa 5 minute introductory video you will be able to create very professional looking photos, photo collages, and slide shows using Picasa.  For videos, tutorials and help with the program visit Picasa and Picasa Web Albums Help.

Best Features:  The most outstanding feature of Picasa for me was being able to make photo collages. There is more than one option for the type of collage and it is easy to add or remove the photos that do not work.  Photoshop is an industry standard but in my books Picasa wins hands down for creating photo collages.

Problems/Limitations:  Picasa locates all the photos on the computer and puts them into folders. When setting up Picasa to locate photos there are two options. The first option searches My Documents, My Pictures and the Desktop for pictures. The second option searches the entire computer looking for pictures. When installing and setting up Picasa on my home computer I selected the first option and numerous folders with images appeared. Many of the folders' names I did not recognize. The reason for this is I had many images in my document folder for other school projects. All of the small, medium and large thumbnails images used in the Dreamweaver program were put into folders. These folders can be removed but this is time consuming. The program would be better if it had an option to bring in photos just from My Documents or just from My Pictures folders.

When creating the Alphabet collage I realized that some of the features I used in Photoshop would have come in handy. Aligning the photos used in the collage was difficult. In Photoshop you can align the photos by selecting them and choosing align bottom, top, left or right edges.

What I would still like to learn:  I really feel quite comfortable with the Picasa program and will continue to use the program and test out the various features. I would like to know how to make copies of the slide show that would play on the television.

My first slide show of the garden with music.

My second slide show of Autumn Leaves.

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