What is Picasa

Picasa is a free program from Google that helps you see the pictures on your computer and you can organize, search, edit, and share them with other people.

What ‘edit’ means is, you obviously do not expect that it could be like a Photoshop, but for most of us it is quite sufficient and it saves you several dollars in your wallet.

I suppose anyone can follow the course on Picasa if the program is already downloaded from the Google site. If you have not already done so, this is the address where you can download it from http://picasa.google.com/.

Installation

When we first open Picasa, Picasa will want to know where the photos that you want to include in the library of Picasa, are located. You must know that Picasa will manage all your photos in a kind of library, the first thing is to let it know where it can find the photographs, or rather what folders on your computer Picasa should scan to retrieve these pictures.

When you choose the option to scan all folders, Picasa will scan all the folders on your computer for your photos. And when I say ‘all’, I mean ‘all’. If you choose to do so, it can take a while.

The most obvious option is the option that scans only the folders “My Documents”, “My Pictures” and the desktop.

Do not panic, we can change this at any time when we are working in Picasa.

My suggestion is that you choose the option to scan “Only My Documents, My Pictures …”, this is a lot faster.

Click the “Continue” button when you have made a choice.

Photo Viewer

Then appears, and this is new in Picasa 3, a configuration window of the new Picasa photo viewer.

The photo viewer is a small program that allow us to quickly view photos on your computer desktop or in Windows Explorer. You can set the Picasa Photo Viewer as the default photo viewer for all types of files supported by Picasa picture viewer (. JPEG,. TIF,. TIFF,. BMP,. POISON,. PSD. PNG,. TGA), and movie files (. avi,. asf,. mov,. wmv,. mpg,. mp4).

If you want to use it as default viewer select the upper radio button (1) and click the “Finish” button.

If you do not want to, you need not install it, select the second radio button (2) and click the “Finish” button. I like this better than the Windows viewer, so I choose the first option.

You do what you want of course. You can still change this later, when you use Picasa.

If you wish to have only the Picasa photo viewer and not use the Picasa program, you must first install Picasa and its photo viewer and then remove Picasa.

In the below photo viewer, we have a menu bar with several buttons that we can use to display images, slightly edit and upload them to Picasa Web Albums without having to fully open.

By clicking on the buttons in the menu bar you can navigate between the different pictures in the folder, you can zoom in and out on the picture and we have a number of buttons that we will discuss in this Picasa course.

Whether this picture viewer installed or not, it does not matter, when you press the “Finish” button, it will open the Picasa program.

The first thing Picasa does is to scan folders on your hard drive (you can see it in the lower right corner of the application (1)), and find the pictures to display in the Photo Library of Picasa (2).

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