Picasa Photo Organizer

by Picasa, Inc.

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00007HFVX
• Item model number: PICASA-GENR-002
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 25, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,384 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Automatic Photo Organizer – instant access to all your pictures!

Picasa makes digital photography easy, fast, and fun, with an intuitive interface that appeals to both novices and experts alike. You can enjoy your entire catalog of pictures within minutes of installation. You do not have to remember cryptic file names or confusing directory structures, instead your pictures are laid out for you visually. Just point and click on a thumbnail of your picture to view, e-mail, print, or watch a slideshow. You can even set your slideshow to your favorite MP3 music files for a complete entertainment experience!

When you install Picasa, it instantly finds and organizes all of your pictures into albums, including: jpeg, tiff, bmp, psd, gif and standard camera movie files. You can sort these albums by name, date, or size and easily move pictures between albums. In one click you can share pictures with family and friends or print them on your local printer, you can even watch a movie! If you’d like professional quality prints, another click sends your picture to our photo lab for processing, then mailed directly to you.

Scroll through a timeline of all your pictures and view slideshows of your albums with the click of a button. Enhance your pictures, fix red-eye, and even crop without losing data or permanently changing your original picture - all without saving multiple copies!

Picasa makes it easy to import pictures from your digital camera. Just plug your camera in, and Picasa will do the rest. Or, use the software that came with your Photo CDor camera to download your pictures to your computer and Picasa will find and organize them automatically.

You will love the simplicity that Picasa brings to the process of importing, organizing and sharing your digital pictures.

Awards

2003 Innovative Digital Product Award, Digital Imaging Marketing Association

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great for beginners only, because:, August 4, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Picasa Photo Organizer (CD-ROM)

Picasa 1.5.1 is a delightfully easy-to-use and inexpensive program that seems to have been developed for beginners who want to manage a limited set of digital photographs. Intermediate users and people with many photographs (that is the point of using an image manager, isn't it?) may quickly outgrow the program due to Picasa's limited metadata handling capabilities, which hurts the program in two ways..

[Picture metadata (data about pictures) are the stuff that allows one to preserve information such as the original date and time of a picture, as well as caption text (so one can recall everyone in a picture or the context of the picture, ten or twenty years later), inside the picture itself.]

Picasa can read some EXIF metadata (the standard used by digital cameras), but has no facility to edit or add to the picture metadata. A consequence is that people who want to scan and organize their shoeboxes of old photographs and film negatives may find Picasa's timeline-based organization useless, unless they resort to an external tool (such as Exifer) to timestamp their scanned pictures. This is ironic, since Picasa uses EXIF time information to sort pictures. Picasa does not support IPTC and XMP metadata.

While Picasa allows descriptive text to be attached to album titles, the program does not allow caption text to be attached to individual pictures. Instead, Picasa relies on a clunky keyword system for photographs. The keywords are not visible either in thumbnail preview or picture view modes. The user must press <Ctrl><K> or click on the Keyword button in the lower left of the screen to view or edit keywords. The keywords are not embedded into the picture, but are separately stored by the program. Anyone with whom you share your pictures will have to enter their own keywords in their own image management software. While keywords optimize Picasa's search functions, keywords do not convey the photographer's comments about the content and context of a picture as well as caption text.

Picasa is a good program for beginners, with potential to become a great program for everyone else in future releases.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I fell in love with Picasa software in 20 seconds, April 25, 2004

By 

Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Picasa Photo Organizer (CD-ROM)

I do a lot of digital photography. I think Windows XP does a fine job organizing and creaing thumbnails of photos, and my transfer software from the camera works pretty well, too. But these can't compare to Picasa Version 1.6, software that works very well to organize, adjust and view collections of photos.

I installed the trial version (full software that expires in 15 days without a serial number.) That's nice--a good way to test out a new product with the full feature set. The installation was quick, and immediately, the software allowed me to pull photos from all over my hard drive. You have a choice of lettting it get photos from the entire drive, or just from folders you choose, such as "My Documents/My Pictures"-- a nice option if you don't want to look at mail attachments or photos in other documents.

Now the intuitive power of the Picasa package comes into play. There are auto buttons for "enhance" (quick fix), Red Eye removal, Crop and other quick fixes you usually need. This is all done on the fly, without having to put each photo into your normal image manipulation software. But...if you want to go further, it's easy enough to open up your image software of choice from Picasa. I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 for more advanced picture adjustments.

However, generally Picasa does a pretty good job routine tasks such as red-eye reduction, so no need to go to Adobe. To do red-eye reduction, just drag your mouse over the eye, and let Picasa do it for you. Not bad results, either. Cropping is a matter of dragging the mouse to select the part of the picture you are keeping, and then click. Done.

Another valuable feature is the ability to resize a photo. Many photos, as they come out of the camera, are too large to email or post on various places online (Ebay, blogs, for example.) To resize, all you have to do is highlight the photo, right-click, and then use the dialog box, with the very useful slider bar that resizes the picture. This is absolutely a slam-dunk. From that point you can go to "E-mail picture" and in a few keystrokes, go from transfer of a photo, to resized, to sent out in the mail. Very quick, very painless, very very cool. Even cooler--a quick setup of a webpage to share your photos. If you aren't adept at HTML or webdesign, this is helpful.

The software is a complete steal at this price. If you are giving a digital camera as a gift, I'd throw this in to make the gift even more marvelous. I am considering getting a copy of this for everyone in our shutterbug-infested family. Absolutely great software.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Totally no brainer, May 19, 2003

By 

Gadgester "No Time, No Money" (Mother Earth) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Picasa Photo Organizer (CD-ROM)

Picasa has been called the iPhoto for Windows. (iPhoto is Apple's digital imaging software for Mac OS X.) The compliment highlights the program's biggest virtue: ease of use. The interface is clean and good-looking, with tools organized in an intuitive manner. While one may fault the designers for the program's lack of sophisticated editing tools (for a more complete package, try Microsoft Picture It 2002), keep in mind that this is a program for casual digital photographers who want to stay sane over organizing their pictures. Organization is what picasa is all about: sorting pictures by timeline, assigning keywords and titles, rotating and one-touch enhancing (works surprisingly well), quick e-mailing... I think Amazon's low price makes this a great buy.

This is version 1.01. You can upgrade to the newest version, v1.5, for free on Picasa.net (not picasa.com!).