It looks like Google is the big news this week. Yesterday we reviewed Google Chrome, the new Windows browser. Also Google has announced a YouTube-like video service called Google Video for Business and a major new release of Picasa, their free photo-editor and organizer.
Picasa’s new version adds many useful new features — ones that you might typically pay “real money” to buy.
Picasa has become more integrated with Picasa Web Albums, Google’s free website version of Yahoo’s Flickr. It has become much easier to move your pictures from your PC to your Web Albums and you can now keep your PC-based album in-sync with your web album. When you edit a picture on your PC, it is automatically copied to the web.
Here’s a few favorites from the Picasa new features:
- Make Movies – edit short videos or make movies from your photos
- Preview Images with Picasa Photo Viewer – Preview Images in Internet Explorer (why IE?) or folders and then edit in Picasa
- Retouch your pictures for blemishes
- Add text or watermarking to your pictures
- Manage folders on your computer – Actually move folders around on your disk
- Get more information about your pictures – Get access to all that geeky info your digital pictures contain like f-stop and shutter speed.
The usual warning applies, this is beta software but it seems very clean and since most Google web services have “beta” tacked to them, I no longer get very concerned. I’ve been using Gmail exclusively for four years and it still is tagged as beta. Also, to Mac users-regret Picasa is Windows-only.
Give it a try, download Picasa 3 beta.
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