Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Cool Tools: Picasa

Christmas DogQuick note tonight.

I've been playing with Picasa, a tool from Google to manage your digital photos. For the kind of photo manipulations that most people need, this is the perfect application. You can crop, brighten, sharpen, play with several different effects like blur and sepia tone.

My favorite? Red eye adjustment. Just box in the demonic eyes, click the button, and your niece has become a cherub, once again.

The other cool thing is that, with the click of a mouse, it can upload pictures to the Google web album area. If you've got a minute, feel free to check out my public albums. I'm no Ansel Adams -- heck, I'm not even Gomez Addams -- but this sure makes it easy for me to share some pretty decent pics with my family and friends.

So, which photo service do you use and why?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Where are the captions, so I can tell who these people are??

I thought Picasa was supposed to be some kind of high quality Google tool. I should be able to mouseover the people in a picture and have Google automatically troll thousands of public databases combined with face recognition software to tell me everything about any pictured person from their name to their shoe size, all in a quarter second.

But nooooooooooooooo.

Spencer said...

I've been using Picasa for a while, now. I switched from Adobe Photoshop Album because the UI was more intuitive for me, and the program was significantly more responsive.

I use Flickr for online photo storage. I haven't checked out the Google Web Albums yet. Flickr has great tools for categorizing and organizing your photos after upload, although it now limits you to 200 photos unless you want to pay for service (which I did, finally, last year). I should look at Web Albums before my renewal date comes around. Maybe I can save a few bucks. :-)