Picasa2 Demonstration

Mike has been using the freeware Google application "Picasa2" since it was first released. He uses it to manage and edit a large and growing collection of digital images, mainly digital camera images. Managing digital images in Picasa2 is a doddle. It does not maintain its own collection of images, but simply "watches" folders that you tell it to watch, and keeps track of the names and locations of all the images of various types in those folders (and subfolders).

Picasa2 can be used to find images very easily, and instantaneously, with a search engine that looks at folder names, image names, embedded "keywords" and captions. Keywords and captions can be easily created and saved within JPG images. New images can be imported (e.g. from a camera or memory stick or scanner) into new or old folders. New folders can be created, existing folders can be renamed, divided or deleted. Images can be moved from one folder to another. Picasa2 can also be used to make quick and easy fixes to images (including cropping, straightening, sharpening, eliminating redeye, changing contrast, colour exposure, saturation, colour temperature, etc).

If that's not sufficient functionality for your fixes, you can shell out of Picasa2 directly into your default industrial-weight image editor, make and save changes, then shell back to where you were in Picasa2. And there's more!: Picasa2 can be used to create Web albums of images that are uploaded for free (up to 250 MB of images; pay for more) to the Google server so that your friends can view the images. Steak knives? - It can resize, attach and send images in Emails. More steak knives? - It can create image slideshows on CDs or DVDs.

That's not all - but surely enough to get you to come along to see see this Swiss army knife in action! During the demo Mike will be using Picasa2, and a number of support applications including Xplorer2, Windows Picture and Fax Viewer and Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 Editor. So you might like to have a quick look at those great apps as well.