Software Review: Picasa

They thought I was too abrasive to write articles here but I found my way back in again. I originally wrote about the free wallpaper but that just wasn't for me. Then I began giving you my own humble opinion about nature but you all became angry with me. Now I'll vent my wrath on helpful software. That should at least be useful for anybody.

I'm going to start off with a little piece of software for you nature lovers called Picasa. If you've never heard of this one it's made by Google. This is an all in one photo viewer, photo editor, and photo uploader. Any nature blogger or photo blogger can use something like this. But why?

You are a nature blogger, which usually involves uploading lots of pictures for your readers to view. You need a way to view which ones you'd like to share. You'd like to make your photos look nice. You are somewhat limited in space to store your pictures online. And while you'd like to share your work, you don't want it stolen. What can help you do all of this and more?

Usually you'd need several pieces of software to help with these tasks. But it would be much better if you had one product that could help with all of it. That's where Picasa comes in. It has the advantage that it does the work of several other products, while doing them mostly easily.

First of all it is a very good looking viewer for your photos. All you have to do is click them to view them with Picasa, and you never have to know how to do anything else. A big Edit button will take you to the editor where a few more clicks can help you get your picture just the way you want it. It's not complicated, but you can only really work with Picasa's presets.

The editor doesn't alter the pictures on your computer either. It saves the edited file in a database of its own. You can then either save the edited picture to disk or upload it to Google+, which really saves it to Picasa Web Albums. Joining Google+ also gives you more space on Picasa Web Albums if you already have an account. Most who use Blogger do.

The thing I don't like About Picasa is the large database it uses. All of your edited pictures have to be stored somewhere. I just wish that I could easily choose where. I also wish it would just save these edited pictures as pictures, and not a database. But that may be okay with many of you. I also wish it was a little better to resize my pictures. It is actually easy in the way it does it, but I'd like more options. I guess that might take away some of the ease though. 

One thing I like a lot is that I can watermark my photos when I export a copy of the edited photo to disk. That's a good security feature for any blogger or Google+ user. I can then upload my pictures to Blogger or any other blog the usual way.

Overall I like Picasa and I use it as my main all purpose picture editor. If you want something where you can edit photos more, then there are other tools. But Picasa will handle most basic tasks as good as anything I've ever tried. Try it out yourself if you think you need a tool like this.

Picasa