Home > Reviews > Picasa > Page 1

If you have a digital camera, you know how quickly you can pile up loads of photos on your computer. It can easily get out of hand. There are numerous programs out there that try to help you organize and find your pictures. One of the best and most popular has been Picasa. Until recently, you had to dish out $30 to use Picasa. Google recently bought Picasa and made it completely free!

There are very few free programs out there that are as polished as Picasa. Picasa has always been known for its simplicity. It is uncluttered, beautifully designed, and very intuitive to use. Even the most novice computer user could learn the program in five minutes. The only word that I can think to describe it is elegant. I know that's a strange word to use to describe a computer program, but if you try it out you'll know what I mean. I hope all software companies follow Picasa's lead.

Picasa is a rather small download at 3.6 MB. After installing, it will scan your hard drive for pictures. You specify which folders you want it use and which folders you want it to "watch" for new pictures.

Picasa is set up like most other image management programs. Albums (folders) are listed on the left side and the thumbnails of the pictures are displayed on the right. Unlike others, Picasa actually shows all the pictures on the computer in the thumbnails pane. Clicking on an album in the albums list just jumps you to that section of the thumbnails. Below the thumbnails is a Picture Tray. You can add images to the Picture Tray and then perform an action (print, email, export, order, etc.) on all of them at once. The top of the screen has six buttons: Collections (to manage your albums), Import (to get pictures from your digital camera), Timeline (a neat way to look at all your pictures, more on this later), Slideshow (self-explanatory), Edit Picture (ditto), and Search (ditto again). The Keyword button is parked in the lower-left portion of the screen next to the picture information.

As I said, the interface is extremely intuitive and easy to learn. There are a few things I’d like to highlight just because they are so neat. Click on the Timeline button and you’ll be sure to say “Wow, that’s cool!” The interface turns into something you’d see in a movie. All of your albums are shown chronologically in a 3D format that moves if you click on an album. As an album is selected, one of the pictures in that album becomes the background. Or you can move the slider at the bottom of the screen to view albums of pictures that were taken at a particular time. Albums are listed chronologically by default on the main Picasa screen, which makes the timeline feature not all that important. Nonetheless, it’s a cool little tool.

The slideshow feature has just what you would expect, but it is the way it’s done that makes it so nifty. The transition between pictures is a quick dissolve that is very smooth, not choppy like other programs I’ve seen. There aren’t any other transition options, but who really needs a slow waterfall transition anyway? You can play MP3s during the slideshow, although you can only specify a folder of MP3s and it will play them starting with the first song in the folder.

Even the scrolling mechanism is innovative. Picasa doesn’t like the way Windows scrolls, so it made its own and it works very well. On the main screen, scrolling through the thumbnails is very smooth, just like something you’d see in a movie. You really have to try it to see what I mean.

1 2 Next