Picasa

When organizing images, your screen may be filled with different windows, so you can move the files from one place to another. If you want to edit them, you will need a third party software. Creating a collage or a presentation will require another software. In short, you will need a different program for each task, if you are using basic tools. Here is what you can do with your images, while using Picasa: mostly anything. You can manage and share them, view them in slideshows, create video presentations and much more.

Since Google bought the software from the original developers, in 2004, Picasa has been offered to the general public for free. It is still free and it still offers many features for organizing, editing or sharing images. The setup kit is 14 and a half Mb large and, after a quick installation process, you can choose to set Picasa as your default image viewer.

When the software is launched for the first time, you will have the possibility of importing all the images on your hard drive or just those from the "My Pictures" folder. Even if you have thousands of images, Picasa will run the indexing process in the background, so you can go ahead and use the interface, without needing to wait for any progress bar to fill up. A small notification window will be displayed in the lower right corner of the screen, telling you what picture is being indexed at that moment. You can, of course, import images at a later time as well.

All the imported images are displayed in the largest area of the interface. They are placed in separate groups, according to their folders of origin and you can scroll through all of them in the same area. Their parent folders are listed in a column, on the left side of the Window. If you select one of these folders, you will jump directly to the contained images in the main list. It is also possible to import videos. You can filter the files to show only videos, images with faces in them or those with geotags. Various tags can be accessed and edited on the left side of the interface, after clicking one of the buttons beneath the thumbnails list.

Images and videos can be loaded by clicking the Import button, in the upper left corner of the interface. The import options will appear under a separate navigation tab, just like in a web browser. Besides selecting a source and a destination folder, you can also tick an option to automatically exclude duplicates, or you can exclude any image manually. There are many things you can do with the imported pictures. A series of options are available for each group of images. They can be used to play an album like a slideshow, in full screen mode, to create a photo collage or a movie presentation or to share the selected images or synchronize them with a web album.

Like the import options, the ones for creating photo collages or movie presentations will appear under separate tabs on the interface. If you double click an image, the view mode on the interface will change, revealing various editing options. Instead of a list, you will find a preview area and you can switch from one image to another by clicking their small thumbnails on the toolbar. The editing options and a histogram can be found next to the preview area. You can use them to crop a selected image, remove red eye effects and add a wide range of filters. If you select a video, you will find options for exporting the clip, taking a snapshot or uploading it to YouTube.