Picasa is a free tool that organizes digital photos. Named after Spanish painter, Pablo Picasso, “Picasa” is a combination of “pic” for pictures, and “casa”, after the phrase “mi casa” for “my house”. It was originally created by Idealab and purchased by Google in 2004.

Picasa enables a user to organize and edit digital photos, create albums and share them with others. Once installed, Picasa automatically finds and collects all the photos on a PC and organizes them together in one place, segmenting by the date they were taken. It has tracking and file importing features, including screen and webcam captures, along with keyword tags that allow for more precise sorting and search capabilities. With facial recognition capability, Picasa allows a user to organize collections according to who’s in the pictures.

Users can create albums, slideshows, collages and movies. Picasa Web Albums offers 1 gigbyte of free storage. Additional storage, that can be shared between Google services, can be purchased. Full-screen slideshows can be arranged on a global map by geotagging an image with geographic coordinates when used with Google Earth.

Simple photo editing functions allows for improving the images. Common problems like red-eye, lighting, contrast and color can be fixed or enhanced with tuning and simple effects available for additional manipulation. With the retouch tool, old photos can be restored to good condition. Images can be cropped and file size altered to prepare them for external use such as printing or emailing.

Though no advertising is displayed on Picasa Web Albums, Google’s terms of service permit the use of photos uploaded to the service to be displayed on the websides and vis RSS feeds. They may also be used royalty-free for Google’s promotion of services. Private photo albums can be viewed by invitation via an “unlisted” URL. These albums are not searchable by the public.

Categories: Glossary
Tags: photo sharing, picasa