The Picasso photo organizer strikes everyone as the picture of simplicity. It’s not the most powerful image manager around, but the Picasso program has the distinction of being the most attractive, with a nice demeanor you don’t usually associate with good looks.
The Picasso program has gotten better over time, much better. Its digital photo editing tools now let you to see your photo tweaks as you make them–no more rendering delays. Multiple levels of undo make it a snap in Picasso to revert to the original image if you decide you don’t like a certain change you made to your digital photo.
Where the Picasso program shines is when it comes to organizing pictures, with improved search capabilities and a time-line slide-show function for beautifully displaying your photo collection inside the Picasso program. Picasso also automatically re-sizes your photos for e-mailing. You get several options for storage and sharing. You can burn albums to CD or DVD, print pictures at home, or use links to several online companies, including Ofoto and Shutterfly. There’s no support for Flickr, however.
The latest version of the Picasso program provides easy access to Picasso Web Albums, so it’s easy to post your pictures online. Picasso also supports geotagging. One caveat: the Picasso program consumes a lot of memory, and even more each time you add a thumbnail, so users with older computers may experience a performance drag. In other respects this free photo editing program is a good choice for amateur shutterbugs with plenty of photos to share.
The Picasso program is not just free. It’s better than ever. With this release, The Picasso program is even easier to use for organizing, editing, and sharing your digital pictures. Without leaving the application, you can move photos across your Microsoft Windows directory, add captions to your photos, pan and zoom, and use 12 new lighting and color effects. You can also save photos to an external drive, burn them to a disc, or upload them to popular photo-sharing Web sites.
When you install the Picasso application, it immediately scans your computer for photos and collects them into a single library. By default, Picasso scans your entire hard drive, but if your system is cluttered, you might opt for a scan of just your Windows desktop, your My Documents folder, and your My Pictures folder. The Picasso program collects not only JPEGs and GIFs, but all sorts of other image formats—even video files.
With past versions of Picasso, also known as Picasa, this photo library acted independently of your Windows file tree, but now the two dovetail quite nicely. One section of the library, dubbed Folders On Disk, shows how your photos are organized within Windows, and you can easily move photos from folder to folder.
You can still organize photos into virtual albums or “labels” that don’t correspond to your Windows file system, and you retain the ability to use the same photo across multiple albums. Picasso’s nifty Timeline still lets you instantaneously scroll through a chronological catalog of your photos. If you aren’t already using a photo manager with such a timeline interface—Adobe Photoshop Album also offers one—you might try the Picasso program for this feature alone. It may be the best way to browse large numbers of photos.
As you organize your pictures, Picasso also lets you change filenames, key in captions, and add ratings to your favorites. Then, as time goes on, you can easily track down old photos with the app’s improved search tool, which lets you locate files by keywords, ratings, and dates.
The real news, however, is the long list of photo-editing tools available with the Picasso program. You can instantly adjust highlights, shadows, fill lights, and color temperature. You can add all sorts of effects, including sepia, black and white, and soft focus. You can crop, straighten, remove red-eye, and more. And if you don’t like an edit, you can reverse it with no more than the click of a mouse.
The Picasso program is must-have for your photo editing needs.
