PICASA 3 (BETA)

Picasa 3 Makes a Great Impression



After your great vacation, your digital camera is no doubt chock-full of images (and maybe a few videos). So how do you view them, touch them up a bit, and share them IN ith friends and family? For Windows users, Picasa has been the best way to do this for a while. Google's online offering is a slickly integrated image organizer, editor, and enhancer, with cutting-edge online galleries. And what's more, it's a free service that competes favorably with pay services.

On the Mac, iPhoto is nearly as good at consumer photo editing. If you want the online galleries, however, you'll have to pay a hundred bucks a year for Apple's Mob ileMe service, and you still won't get the rich mix of features you'll find in Picasa Web albums, such as geotagging and viewer commenting. With this release, Picasa adds the abilities to sync local edits with online gallery images, to edit digital movies, and to retouch photos for blemishes.


It also turbocharges red-eye fixing, collage creation, and slideshow presentations. After installation, Picasa gives you a choice of scanning either your hard disk or just My Documents, My Pictures, and the desktop for image files. You don't have to worry about the scan picking up all those temporary Internet image files, by the way—it's smart enough to ignore them. The scan is fast, and a small gray bar on the right-hand side of your screen shows its progress.

Picasa 3 doesn't have a drastically updated interface, but rather adds a lot of new functions within the existing interface, such as automatically scanning for new images; viewing images as a slideshow, collage, or movie; Movie, Geo-Tag, and Upload buttons; and the cool new Silhouette button (which finds any picture in an album that contains a face).

In short, for everyday shutterbugs who want to get those pictures off their point-and-shooters, organize them into albums, fix them up a bit, and—most important—share them with their loved ones, Picasa is the way to go. MM

PC Magazine February 2009