Picasa is a flashy and functional free digital photo collage software which has improved considerably since its first release. Although I expected better organization and searching capabilities from a Google property, Picasa is excellent for beginners and casual digital shooters who want to find all their pictures, sort them into albums, make photo collages, and share with friends and family.
Picasa Web Albums lets you make photo collages and post photos to the online web album directly from Picasa on Windows computers or iPhoto on Macs. Picasa Web Albums is one of the best photo collage software on the market, especially it's freeware.
Pro:
Does basic tasks for free
Provides better red-eye removal, quick fixes and effects, and online sharing options than other picture collage software.
Display your pictures as a custom screensaver, collage, or slide show movie.
Designed for non-techies and casual digital photographers.
Cons:
Not so powerful for making photo collages comparing with Photo Collage Studio.
Can't make photo book, greeting card and calendar.
Tied to a folder-based system of organization.
Limited organizational and searching features.
Free GIMP software offers more complexity.
When you first run Picasa, it finds and sorts all your pictures into albums based on existing folder names. This may sound good in theory, but it's not very useful if you don't already have descriptive folder names. If you're just starting with digital photography, it's fine, but if you have a lot of pictures already, you may need to make adjustments.
In addition to the folders list, you can create custom photo groupings using "Albums." Pictures can also be annotated with keywords and captions which are written to the photo files. Picasa does not offer a system for rating photos, but you can apply a star to photos you wish to mark as favorites.
Picasa 3 improves the photo organization and search features, although I still feel this area of the program is a bit weak. The previously-hidden keyword tagging feature is now exposed and improved to support multi-word tags, making it more compatible with other software. Unfortunately, tags in photos you had previously imported will remain as individual words unless you remove the folders from Picasa and re-import them.
Other useful improvements in Picasa 3 include:
A text tool which lets you print captions directly on the photos.
The options to display captions in prints and slide shows.
Automatic red eye correction, which works quite well.
A new retouching tool for erasing out scratches and blemishes
A slick photo viewer
Online synchronization
New collage types
Crop suggestions
and more.
Picasa has just about everything home users will need for working with and sharing their personal digital photos. But there's a lack of power to make
photo collage,
greeting card &
calendar. If you'd like to make your own photo book with fun, just try another software
Photo Collage Studio.
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