The Best Free Training

Topic: How to use Google’s free photo editing (organizing & sharing) software, Picasa
Format: Short videos with audio narration, screen shots & guidance re: menu choices
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

Isn’t it time for you to take control of that over-grown, disorganized collection of digital photos you have scattered all over your hard drive, tablet, and camera? If you’re like me, you’ve probably got years and years of digital images tucked away in long-forgotten corners of several different storage devices. In fact, just thinking about the task of getting them all organized left me feeling a bit queasy… it seemed completely overwhelming!

Then I found out about Picasa. Picasa is Google’s free photo managing software that provides powerful tools that will:

•  Scour all your digital devices and find every digital image on each of them
• Help you review, evaluate, organize, edit, improve the quality, and label all the images it finds
• Isolate all — yes, ALL — the images with people in them and apply Google’s powerful face recognition technology to help you create collections of specific, individual people, no matter how widely scattered across devices the images are! (For example, it will help you build a folder containing only picutes of Aunt Minerva, a folder with pictures of your wife, a folder with your high-school pal Juan, etc.)
• Create collages, slide shows, and videos from your digital images & photos
• Help you upload them to Google’s free Picasa web storage (1GB free!) and keep them synchronized with your various devices
• Help you selectively share some web albums with friends, some with family, or even some with the general public.

After learning to use Picasa, I installed it on my wife’s computer. And while we explored all the features, she kept asking me, “Are you sure this is really free? How can that be? It’s got everything!”

Picasa Software: How to Get It

• You can learn more and get Picasa your free Picasa download here:  http://picasa.google.com/

Some Good, Basic Picasa Tutorials

• YouTube video from Google “Introducing Picasa 3″  — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rskC6c_5L1M
• Google’s own Picasa tutorial/info pages: “https://support.google.com/picasa/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1753765&topic=1751920&rd=1“
• Several Detailed, Well-Paced YouTube Videos from the College of Charleston School of Teaching, Learning and Technology: 
  • Picasa (part 1 of 6) – An Introduction — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW4FYA2Eyro
  • Picasa (part 2 of 6) – Organizing Photos in Folders and Albums — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW0SXkPE60o
  • Picasa (part 3 of 6) – Editing an Image — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Epbd3wxAM
  • Picasa (part 4 of 6??? … I can’t find it anywhere!! But the other 5 are really good, so let’s just count our blessings, okay?)
  • Picasa (part 5 of 6) – Identifying Pictures Using the People Pane — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXZddBMxILE
  • Picasa (part 6 of 6) – Identifying Photos Using the Tags Panel — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3FshKd6t98

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