Picasa.com - Google's new photographic portal

As if Google.com had any problems with acquiring new technologies along comes Picasa.com and helps Google let people share graphics and video for free! Google.com has always been synonymous for giving people what they wanted and best of all for free. Since this recent acquisition, Google continues to snap up quality companies that it feels that is inline with its vision.

So what is Picasa.com really?

Picasa.com is a free photo organizer that allows you to share your photos with friends and family. Best of all, its free! Picasa.com is integrated with enhanced photo editing tools that could possibly rival Photoshop with the ease of use and portability. Picasa.com allows the user to upload collections of photos, edit them and create a scrapbook or photo album for selected viewers to see.

With the enhanced photo editing tools, you can feather an image, remove redeye, and change a photo from color to black and white. Other features include cropping images, sending completed photos to a processor for printing, sharing photos via email.

How do I get started?

As with any freeware all you need is a computer that is attached to the Internet. Picasa’s software is designed to run on Microsoft Windows platforms. It supports JPEG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PSD, AVI, MPG, ASF, and WMV files. You can even import video with the usage of AVI, MPG and WMV, as all formats are popular with Microsoft Media Player.

Just visit Picasa.com and click on free download to start the installation process. The installation file is less than 4 MB and shouldn’t take too long to download if you are on a cable modem or dsl connection. Upon accepting the terms of the licensing the installer will fire off the application. You will be prompted to upload your pictures upon request. You can have the software upload them for you or you can manually select which files and folders to include. This is helpful should there be photos you do not wish to share.

Upon setting up your photo preferences you can set up which photos to add to which collection as well as work on each photo right there. Another neat feature is that if you are away from your computer and find an image you would like to scan you can install the software anywhere and upload it into your profile. Picasa truly is another outstanding free feature from the minds at Google.

What makes this software even better is that its backed by 24x7 support and a forum of fellow users that can share experiences and help you troubleshoot your problem if you have one.

Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.comVisit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.