Notes on Picasa presentation

Norman Dunlap, leader of the QC Computer Society’s digital photography group demonstrated this new software. Vicki Wassenhove demonstrated some of its "sharing" techniques.

Norm and I would like to thank you for attending the Picasa 3 session. We hope you learned enough to jump right in and give it a test drive yourself! I think you will be surprised at what it can do to improve your own photos.

Once installed, Picasa searches your hard drive for all digital images, movies, and videos and organizes them in one place, ready to be edited, printed, made into movies or collages, and then shared with your friends, family or the world. You can even send a "captured video" from your webcam with the same ease.

One thing I forgot to mention.... If you don't want to have all your photos show up in Picasa 3, Google makes it possible to "hide" those files.

Picasa 3 is one of the most user-friendly and versatile photo editors that I've used. There are a few things that it won't do. I'm not ready to discard my purchased $$$ photo editors just yet, but some tasks are so much easier in this new FREE version that I am using it almost exclusively for adding text, creating collages, and "batch editing".

Picasa's Web Albums are perfect for sharing those photographic memories with others. They offer so much free storage on their site (a gigabyte) that you no longer need to ship all those photos to your sister in CA. Just "share" them by sending a link to your latest uploaded album. She'll be happy that her email account isn't bogged down with all those attachments you used to send! And she can download the ones she wants to print or save.

Hope you are ready to try the Picasa 3 program by yourself now. Please send us your questions or bring them to the next digital SIG on Wednesday, February 18th.

We are a club of "Members Helping Members" as our motto indicates. We work together at our special interest groups to find solutions to problems, so you may be able to answer someone else's question next month. Non-members may attend a SIG once as a visitor before joining the club.

Also, please send us suggestions for other monthly SIGs, short-term SIGs or general meetings. QCS wants to answer your needs with our topics.

Vicki Wassenhove, QCS Webmaster and Google Fan!

Here are some review notes, links and tips to help you investigate Picasa 3.

Picasa 3 is the brand-new and improved version of Google’s FREE photo organizer—and it now includes more editing capabilities. It is easy to organize, edit and share your digital photos with its user-friendly interface. Picasa 3 may be all you need to improve your pictures.

System requirements:

XP, Vista or Linux (Beta version offered for Macs)

100 MB Hard Drive

256 RAM

Download Picasa 3: http://picasa.google.com/

Read about all of Picasa 3's new features:

http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93773

Overview - Fast and easy photo sharing from Google: http://picasa.google.com/features.html

Learn the basics of Picasa: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93183

"Sharing tips": http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93183#share

Picasa Web Album Site: From GMail, click on "pictures" just above the search box to reach your album. location. If you don't have an account, you must be invited by someone to view an album. (Or temporarily, try the link in my note at the top.)

Here is a link to the Dutch photographer's pictures in Picasa Web Albums.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Mirudimi
If that doesn't work because you don't have a Google or Gmail account, then try this link:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Mirudimi/UILEN?feat=email#
Once there, click the tab labeled "rudy en mieke's Gallery" to see the rest of his public web albums.

Picasa Web Album Help: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8989

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Here's a link to another good Google offering, "Gmail":

"Gmail makes email easy and efficient. And maybe even fun."
Read Google's 10 reasons to use Gmail and create a free account of your own.
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/about.html

Norm Dunlap, normdun@gmail.com leads the Digital Media SIG. It meets the third Wednesday of each month.
For more information about this group, check the Digital SIG page.
.
Vicki Wassenhove, wazz123@gmail.com is the QCS Webmaster and a retired art teacher.
She is interested in all phases of digital imagery.