Over the past year there has been a spate of new applications that act as image editors, viewers and photo managers on the computer. Many of these programs base the best features on sharing photos in social netowork and especially on Facebook.
Since all these image viewers integrated with Facebook are practically all similar and always rather poor, we might as well focus our attention on the best program to view photos and images on your computer: Picasa .
The strength of Picasa is the mix of simplicity of use and power in the functions that include sharing on the internet, editing to improve images and organizational capacity.
In this post, I try to dig deep into the most hidden and most useful features of Picasa, the Google photo management program.
1) The Movie Maker
With Picasa you can create a video with photos that slide one after the other and background music.
You can then add animated transition effects between one photo and another, you can write a superimposed text such as captions or subtitles, change the color of the text and the background and then upload the video to Youtube directly from Picasa.
2) Collage
With Picasa you can create an index page of all your favorite photos like a collage on a wall or panel.
The fill color is customizable and improves the appearance of the collage.
Picasa allows you to use different layouts to arrange the photos on the page and a good range of formats for collages so you don't have to manually resize the images to fit them on the screen and making the page bigger.
3) Remove low quality images
Picasa's continuous indexing feature is a sometimes valuable and sometimes annoying feature.
In fact Picasa indexes all the folders with images inside the computer and to remove them you have to act manually.
However, it is possible to remove low-quality images from the collection so that only photos taken with your camera remain in Picasa.
This option can be seen when printing an image by pressing the Check button at the bottom right.
4) Timeline view
In Picasa, photos can be collected in various places depending on the folder in which they are stored.
However, all photos can be sorted by the date they were copied to the computer or by size and other attributes.
The Timeline function is a really nice viewing mode to watch, with 3D graphics and photos that are arranged along a timeline.
The Timeline is activated from the View menu.
5) Group the faces
Picasa integrates a search filter has really changed the way people are found from images saved on the computer .
The face-matching technology implemented in Picasa search makes it extremely easy to find people with their name.
Basically, after the first scan of the photos, Picasa automatically recognizes all those where there are human faces and faces.
By clicking on People from the left menu, you will see the various faces to which you just have to assign a name.
After writing a person's name, they will automatically be recognized in all other photos.
The facial tag process in Picasa is as innovative as it is simple, fast and intuitive.
At the end you can browse the photographs based on people, friends or relatives.
6) Filter based on the colors
Aside from the face recognition filter, Picasa has the ability to search for photos based on the predominant colors.
For example, you can view all the black and white images in the collection or apply other conditions.
The color filters are in Tools -> Other functions -> Search .
7) Associate music to each album
The best way to enjoy a slideshow of images (as per point 1) is to set suitable background music.
The music is chosen in Tools -> Options -> Slideshow and the songs contained in the chosen folder are played at random.
To associate a particular music with a specific album just click on an album in the navigation bar, select Change folder description and choose a song from the computer where it is written use music for slideshow.
8) Edit many photos together
The first thing to do every time you import photos from your digital camera to your computer is to adjust the orientation of the images, rotating them horizontally or vertically and vice versa.
Instead of rotating them one by one, you can edit a whole group of photos in one click from the Image -> Bulk Edit menu.
As you will see, in the photo group editing options there are rotation, renaming and also a great red-eye corrector, to improve the sharpness of the images, adjust the color and contrast of the images.
Tuttel and operations are automatic and truly of a high quality level.
9) Face Movie
I had already talked about this in another article describing the Face movie as a transition effect with zooming on the faces in the image slidesohow.
The best part is that there is no need to manually mark the person's face area because Picasa using the People filter automatically locates the faces in the selected photos, allowing you to create a Face Movie with a single click.
10) Create a Gift CD
If you want to give a photo CD to a friend, girl or relative you can use Picasa's gift CD function.
From the Create menu, you can choose gift CD and find a graphical interface where you just need to choose the photos to copy to the CD.
The disc will also include the Slideshow for better viewing of the photos.
With the Burn button, the photos are copied to the CD.
11) Associate photos with places in Google Maps
With the direct integration of Google Map, Picasa gives users with a Google account the opportunity to write down their favorite places visited with images saved on their computer.
Go to the View -> Places menu and wait for the map to be drawn up.
Once the area where to locate the photo is highlighted, just use the mouse to drag it to a point on the map and geotag it.
12) Photo sharing
Picasa also offers a 1 GB online space for uploading your favorite photos to the internet in Picasaweb .
In addition, you can upload photos to the BLogger platform which allows you to create a free photo blog and also to upload images and photos to Facebook directly from the Windows desktop .
In Picasa there is also an automatic function to create html pages with photos, by right clicking on an album and choosing " Export as html page ".
13) Among other things that you can do, there is the creation of screensavers with photos
If you haven't already done so, I really recommend downloading and installing Picasa, offered for free by Google.
