Since we are still flooded with questions about resizing images, I’m guessing not everyone has heard of Picasa. At least not since Google bought it in 2004. It’s a powerful photo manager/editor that goes head-to-head with Photoshop Elements.
The complete version of Photoshop is more widely used by professionals, and “photoshopping” soon became the verbiage of choice for all photo-editing, which means other, mostly less-expensive software didn’t get the same billing. And though they were less-expensive, they still cost a lot more than the average digital Joe wanted to shell out.
Then Google, being the crazy Google we’ve come to know & love, bought the software in 2004. And decided to give it away for free. Seriously. It?s free. And downloadable. Check it out here . So not more excuses for not being able to resize an image yourself.
Picasa 2.0’s editing tools are a bit more user-friendly for picture digital novices than PE 3.0, but they aren’t as extensive, and PE has more options for finding & viewing photos. They both make sharing photos a snap through automatic emails, IMs, cameral phones and auto-uploading to the web. You can even send the pictures off to an online printer with just a few clicks.
There are only two real downsides to using PE over Picasa, but they’re huge. First, it doesn’t support web-based email clients. You actually have to manually upload the pics to a drafted email. Which we all know is way too much work. Don’t forget Picasa is now a Google application, so emailing pictures is a one-click wonder.
The other big difference is that Picasa has one-click uploading to blogs, which is even more important to Constant Chatterers than image resizing.
Oh, and then there’s that little issue of money: Picasa is frrrrrreeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!
