HeadQuarters

Carrying on with the theme of last weeks article, lets keep it free and focus on a few of those good Free alternatives out there.  Lets start with Picasa from Google.  Picasa is a photo management tool which makes dealing with photos much easier then trawling through directories.  If you're like most pople and have a digital camera, than changes are you have a large quantity of photos strewn all over your computer then Picasa is a tool you must consider.  I've used many different applications for managing photos and they have all failed in some area badly for me.  


If you want to find out more check out www.picasa.com  And while that page is loading... what's so great about Picasa?  Once installed Picasa will scan your computer for all images.  This is great, but it can also scan your cache and other directories. I recommend making a conscious decision to keep all you photos (you know, the ones you want in an album) in your My Pictures directory and setting Picasa to monitor this directory.  Monitoring means that no matter where you load your pictures from they'll end up in picasa (as long as you put them in My Pictures).  To stop scanning the rest of your computer select TOOLS – FOLDER MANAGER and only select your My Pictures folder.

You can retouch your photos in Picasa, this will enable you to get rid of niggly little issues on your photos. You can also tweak the lighting, take out the red eye, add some appealing filters and all that jazz.  The retouch function is great if you're on a mission to digitise all your existing photos via a scanner.

Add watermarks and captions to your images. You can also create a collage of photos for print or email, Share your photos online, crop them, create a screensaver and organise your photos based on time or tag them to represent a holiday or certain person in the photo.  

One of the best features of picasa is the ability to resize and email your photos without too much hassle. You do this by selecting (Hold) the photos your wish to email. On the row of buttons at the bottom of the Picasa window is an email button.  Clicking this will ask you if you want to use Google Mail (Gmail) or your default email program, such as Thunderbird, Outlook Express or Outlook.

If you've struggled with photos in the past and have constantly had emails returned to you when trying to send photos to family or friends overseas then Picasa is a great tool to help you enjoy digital photography.

Lots more information available from www.picasa.com  

Tags: Picasa | Free | Google