Picasa for Mac: Google’s answer to iPhoto
Everything you need to manage your photos
Picasa is an indispensable piece of software for photography fans, and functions in a number of different ways – as a cataloguer and viewer, as an editor and as a sharing software.
With Picasa, you can import any photos and pictures that are stored on your PC. Picasa lets you select the drive and folders to scan and gives you the option of synchronizing automatically each time you open up the software. You will no longer have to manually import new pictures.
Once your photos have been added to Picasa, they are organized into albums that will appear in folders with the same names from which they were taken. Then, you can reorganize and move photos from one location to another by simply dragging and dropping. Picasa also lets you add tags to your pictures so that you can sort them easily, including adding the location in which the photos were taken, or the people in the photo, so that you can easily find them.
Picasa isn’t specialist editing software, but it does provide an interesting array of features that you can use to perform basic edits, either image by image, side by side or in batches, including cropping, straightening, adjusting color and contrast, enhancing sharpness, red eye correction, and applying filters.
Other features are built in to Picasa so that you can use your photos to create posters, montages, screensavers and even movies. It can all be viewed through the external Picasa viewer and can be shared with others in multiple ways, including in the Picasa web platform, your Google+ account, Blogger, and email.
Finally, Picasa also includes some very useful options to detect duplicate and empty albums, geo-tag photos, save, and compress your photos.
Accessible software
Picasa is software that is both comprehensive and accessible. It doesn’t offer many advanced settings, but the editing tool is perhaps the best example of its ease of use. Its graphical interface is intuitive and gives immediate access to all the options in the program. Less experienced users will benefit from the comprehensive help that’s built into the software so that they can better understand its features and how to use them.
The all-in-one that has it all
Being able to handle the processing of your photos from the point of import to sharing with others, Picasa is ideal for organizing your photo albums, doing the first retouches of your photos, and sharing them with your loved ones. Picasa is easy to access, and amateur photographers will really appreciate what it can offer, especially if they already use other Google services.
This program can no longer be downloaded. Take a look at
Changes
- Share with your Google+ circles
- Upload Picasa tags on Google+
- New photo editing effects
- Side-by-side editing of photos
