I love Picasa. Here are five reasons you should use it, along with some tips. They are listed in no particular order.
1. Picasa Photo Viewer is Fast and Beautiful
Picasa’s photo viewer provides a nice alternative to the default windows photo viewer. It pops up images in a nice smooth animation and gives you some options, which are shown in the image above. It’s a very aesthetically pleasing way to view your images, and doesn’t require you to use any other part of Picasa! After Picasa is installed, just go to your start menu, go to the Picasa 3 entry, and click Configure Picasa Photo Viewer.
2. It Provides Quick and Easy Backup to the Web
I never got into Flickr or any other image sharing sites, but I find Picasa to be a great (and simple) way for me to keep back ups of my images online. All you have to do is sign into your Google account and click Sync to Web! Before doing this, you may want to go into Picasa, go to Tools and then Options, and go to the File Types tab to make Picasa add more file types, then go to the Web Albums tab and change the default size to Original so it doesn’t resize your images.
3. Easy Image Editing
While it may not be as powerful as Photoshop, Picasa is still a great program for editing images. It replaces most things with simple sliders and buttons. I actually prefer this to Photoshop for fast edits just because of its simplicity and speed. It also saves the original in case you ever want to revert it back. The above shows a photo before and after some simple slides and button presses.
4. Nice Screen Saver
Picasa has a really nice looking screen saver with lots of different settings. To get to it in Picasa, go to Tools and Configure. Then click Settings to change some stuff. It offers several different ways to cycle through you images and allows you to choose which folders for it to use. Or you can even use an RSS feed!
5. It’s Made by Google!
I won’t deny it, I’m a Google fan. I like pretty much everything Google releases. But even if you aren’t a Google fan boy, Picasa being made by Google still benefits you. It integrates well with your gmail and Picasa web albums, and Google loves easter eggs! Like the one above. You press Ctrl+Shift+Y to see it, and you can keep pressing it for more. They can also be dragged around.
Reasons no to like Picasa
Simple, no means of contacting anyone at Google. I would say, at least provide for contacting help for beginners. When that happens, I will consider installing Picasa again.
There’s only one thing I don’t like about Picasa Photo Viewer: the lack of support for animated gifs and gif/png transparency =(