Love ya Google - Picasa

Topic: Picasa|Level: Beginner - Intermediate|Type: Informational

Google Account
Ok, first of all if you don't already have a Google account go get one. Once you have your Google account you can use all their many products with your one account. Even if you don't use their email (even though they do web-based email by far the best) you can still use whichever other products (iGoogle custom homepage, Picasa, Orkut, calendar, documents, blogging, notebook, G Talk, etc) you want with that one account.
(But if you're still using yahoo or hotmail/msn or any other web-based email service... just do yourself a favor, leave them as your spam email account and get a gmail account. Gmail even allows you to pull email from other POP3/IMAP enabled accounts to the Gmail interface if you do want to keep them around but not check 2 accounts. If you want more info about gmail see my Love ya Google - Gmail post

Picasa Parts
http://picasa.google.com/
Picasa is a Google product for photo (and video) management and hosting. There are two parts to it; the desktop application and the Picasa Web Albums.
The Picasa desktop application allows you to sort your photos in to albums, view, edit, label, caption, delete them, etc. There is even a Mac Beta version (http://picasa.google.com/mac/).
The Picasa Web Albums allows you to upload photos from Picasa (desktop application) to online Albums that you can then share.

Picasa Desktop Software
The Picasa desktop software has lots of features for sorting photos in albums, editing them, all sorts of things. The dekstop software also makes sharing any of your photos very easy. The buttons across the bottom allow you to Upload (to Picasa Web Albums), Email, Print, Export, send to a Blog, make a Collage or Movie/slide show, or even Shop for printing services (send your photos online to be printed and picked up in a store of your choice.)

To get any of your photos or videos online all you have to do is click the "Upload" button. A simple interface then appears where you can specify what album the item is uploaded to, size settings, and visibility of the item. Items that have been uploaded to the Web Albums will show a small green Up arrow in the lower-right of the image. If you edit an image that has already been Uploaded, after making your changes and clicking Upload again Picasa will change the existing online image to reflect your changes, rather than creating another image online.

Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web Albums part is the online image hosting part of the service. Your "Web Albums" can be completely different from your desktop software's "Albums". You can have images in desktop albums but not in web albums, or images in web albums and not in the desktop albums. You can also choose to have an album in your desktop automatically synchronize to a web album. Using this option you can even have them sync, then manage and delete images through the web interface from anywhere, and when you sync your desktop again it will even reflect those changes on your local computer.

You can also select an image through the web interface, and in the "Edit" options select "Edit in Picasa" (if you're on a computer with Picasa installed), and selecting that option will download the image to the local computer, open Picasa to edit the image, and when you close the editor it will automatically upload the changes back to the web.

Your Picasa Web Albums can have different levels of being shared. Anybody can go to your Picasa Web Albums page (i.e. http://picasaweb.google.com/nickolashook ) and see Albums you have set for "Public" visibility. "Unlisted" albums anybody can get to if they're given a special link, but they do not show up on your Web Albums page. "Sign-in required to view" albums allow you to click a "Share" button, and specify people (from your Google Contacts or manually typed email addresses) that will be emailed a link to the album and then have to be signed in to see them.

Face Recognition
Another really cool feature of the Picasa Web Albums is it can detect faces in your photos and group the faces it detects to be of the same person. You can then specify who that person is (even pick them from your Google Contacts if you have them set up there) and then you can easily find all the photos of a particular person by simply clicking their name.