Manage Your Photo Collection with Google Picasa

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Google is not a search company anymore – they also write some wonderful software that can help you design 3D homes, chat with friends on the internet, manage your jumbo digital picture collection or travel to any corner of the world virtually. Let’s talk Picasa today. There are loads of interesting things that you can do with Picasa, the free photo and video management software for your computer from, you guessed it right, Google. The first time you run Picasa, it scans your computer for all images and video content. The software does this automatically and you may discover some old digital photographs that you thought were deleted but they were residing in some deep folders on your hard drive. Though Picasa is not as advanced as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, its photo editing capabilities are still good enough to satisfy most consumers. You can auto-adjust colors, resize / crop pictures or add professional looking effects to make your photos stand out. You don’t want to lose your precious Kodak moments due to hard disk errors or system crash. It is easy to remain safe by using the inbuilt backup feature of Picasa that burns your pictures to a CD / DVD or uploads them on to the web directly with minimal effort. The pictures that have been previously uploaded to the web show up with a green arrow icon in Picasa to indicate that a copy exists online. Picasa can also create movies of your photographs which look very similar to auto playing photo slideshows. This is a pretty neat hack for sharing photos on sites like YouTube or Google Video that generally do not accept images. Photo bloggers love Picasa since they can publish photos on their blog from the desktop with a simple click. Picasa can also create personalized wallpapers that look like a pile of photo postcards lying randomly on a coffee table. Each time you click the wallpaper, the photo arrangement changes. Need more reasons for using Picasa? The software ships with a free Google Photos screensaver that can take live photo feeds from the web and show them on your idle computer screen. You can have Flickr photos, news related pictures from Reuters or any photo stream that’s available as an RSS feed and use it as a desktop screensaver.