Picasa is Google’s software application dedicated to editing and publishing photos for the web. The program is free and very easy to use, placing it among the ranks as popular web photo services like Flickr. Here is a quick run down of Picasa’s features and uses.

After importing your photo files into Picasa, you can resize, crop, reduce red eye and enhance the color of your pictures. You can also optimize your pictures so that they can easily be sent as emails or as elements of web pages. Printing optimization, slide shows and image timelines are also included. There are customizable tabs that allow you to name and divide sections for your photos, organizing them a cleat fashion.

In order for you to easily search through your digital photo albums, Picasa uses IPTC keyword data to keep track of the keywords attached to your jpegs. This also allows other photo programs like iPhoto and Adobe Photoshop to access these keywords for cross-accessibility. The search bar is an incredibly useful tool when you are dealing with literally hundreds of photos imported from your camera.

Application on the Web

Picasa Web Albums allows you to publish your photo albums on the web; offering up to 1 GB of free space if you have a Google Account. Any extra space can be purchased, usually in affordable yearly plans. All URLs to private photos albums remain secured under Picasa’s “unlisted number” addresses, allowing users without Google Accounts to view albums when they receive an email from that album’s poster.

Sharing and Blogging photos

Hello is an Instant Messaging Service in Picasa that allows users to easily transfer photos to one another, with features geared towards bloggers wanting to post their files. Simply clicking the ‘Blog This’ tool quickly uploads the transferred image to the user’s blog. There are also Wordpress widgets in Picassa for the same function.

Future uses

After Google acquired Neven Vision’s image recognition technology that allows users to search for specific features within photos like places or people. Google is hoping on utilizing this technology with Picasa sometime in the future (source: wikipedia).

As social media marketers at an internet marketing company, we recognize that the transference and refinement of digital photos is an essential part of drawing in readers to your website or blog. Picasa appears to be one of the premier applications for polishing your company’s aesthetics.

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