I’ve always been someone who was fascinated by the world of pictures. From back in the days when I took my semester abroad, I’ve always enjoyed taking large amounts of pictures. The downside of pictures with old-fashioned film is the fact that there are so many throwaways. I suppose that one way of thinking about it is that there is a certain skill to develop and a practice that brings you to actually enjoying the act of taking a picture.
For me, I think that there is something even more enjoyable about digital cameras though. I can take pictures by the hundred and then save only the ones I want, without having wasted lots of money on film for blurry or backlit photos. Furthermore, I can fix red eye and sharpen and so on.
All of this has been a great switch to digital pictures, but the real problem is that I couldn’t find a program that was simple enough so that I could encourage people to take pictures, even when they didn’t have lots of time to perfect taking pictures. Even now I still find it a struggle to get people to take pictures. Enter Picasa.
Recently, I’ve finally started to use Picasa, a program that Google has created for organizing digital photos (and videos). It is a great program and you have the ability to be able to get pictures organized and cleaned up and even add captions and tags to them. I think that this is one of the best things about Picasa and Google in general. They have not sat on their laurels since the program was developed.
Instead they use all of their money and resources and continually improve their projects. Furthermore, these are offered for free and then are able to be given to people for everyone’s use. This is another example of a great product from Google with tons of features.
The portability of Picasa is the best part of it. It is available on the web using a web-sync version so that the pictures are easy to share and are saved for the future. Furthermore, there is no worry that if you switch the brand of digital camera that you won’t be able to use the program for merging and organizing your picture library. Instead, Picasa is entirely independent of the platform where you take the pictures. This alone is a great selling point.
