Google Releases Updated Picasa Photo Sharing and Management Tool
Google today released Picasa 2, a free photo management software that makes it simpler than ever for people to organize, edit and share their digital pictures. Google’s new version of Picasa offers photographers of all skill levels easy-to-use tools that automatically organize even the largest photo collections on a PC and turn average snapshots into great pictures.
Picasa was founded in October 2001. In May 2004, Picasa announced a technology partnership with Google’s Blogger service to make publishing digital photos with Blogger faster and easier. Google then acquired Picasa in July of 2004.
“With Picasa 2, we’ve made it easier for people to organize, improve and enhance their photographs, as well as create photo CDs, personalized slideshows, desktop collages, and much more,” said Lars Perkins, General Manager, Picasa, Google Inc. “Digital photos are an important and growing category of personal information, and Picasa is in line with Google’s commitment to develop advanced technologies that further help users to find, organize and share information that’s important to them.”
New and improved features of Picasa include:
* Advanced editing tools – Fix pictures with more powerful tools, 12 photographic filter effects, color and lighting adjustments, red-eye removal, photo cropping and straightening.
* Improved organization – Add captions, quickly and easily search across all photos on a computer, attach labels and stars for better photo organization, reorder pictures and clean up cluttered folders.
* Backup capabilities – Archive photos from a computer to a CD or DVD, save photos on an external drive, and create gift CDs with personalized slideshows.
* Customized prints- Print at home with standard sizes, or order photo prints by uploading pictures to Ofoto, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Walmart.com.
* Enhanced sharing features – Email photos via Gmail (and other email clients), upload photos to a Blogger blog, and send and discuss photos in real-time via Hello(TM), Picasa’s free peer-to-peer software, available at http://www.hello.com.
