TTP - Powerful Picasa by Google

Ever since the introduction of digital cameras, educators have been integrating these wonderful tools into their instruction and classrooms in creative ways. Of course, without the worries of wasting film and the convenience of using these devices, there is a drawback to these emerging technologies, management of images.

Digital cameras have truly changed the way we take pictures, but have made the management of the image files somewhat complicated. That is where the power of Picasa comes in. Picasa by Google, is a FREE robust photo application that makes it easy to organize, edit, and share your digital photos. Once installed, Picasa will scan you're your entire system for media files and then it will manage them into visual albums organized by date with folder names. What I find to be most fascinating is that it can even located images that have been forgotten. This is nice because if duplicates of images are found, they can be deleted to free up storage space. Then, each time you launch Picasa, it will automatically locates and update this easy to understand visual library.

Picasa in not only a great media manager, but is also has some simple, but yet powerful photo editing tools. Picasa makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips, allowing the user to do basic fixes like cropping, straightening, the ability to fix red-eye and color and lighting. Then it also allows for the use o even do some fine tuning and add 12 lighting and color effects.  Users can also pan, zoom and rotate images and even add captions. Image can be saved to an external drive, burn them to a disc, or uploaded to popular photo-sharing Web sites.

Picasa also makes it very simple to share images - they can emailed, printed on you classroom printer, made into CDs, or uploaded to a blog site with just one click. It also offers Web Album feature where users can upload their photos to the web with just one click. You can even download your friends" photos directly back to Picasa on your own computer. It's never been so easy to share photos online.

Now I have left two of the coolest features for last; the first being the collage feature. This incredible feature allows users to quickly and easily create unique collages out of images contained in the library. There are four features to choose: picture pile, picture grid, contact sheet, and multi exposure. Each of these are unique and very cool, but hard to describe so I will examples on my site. Lastly, Picas offers a timeline feature that lets you instantaneously scroll through a chronological catalog of your photos.

Picasa also supports many scanners and cameras so users can import of images from these devices using just Picasa software.

Finally, Picasa is easy enough for anyone to use even elementary students. So this tool is perfect for students to use to organize and make those final touches to photos being used for digital storytelling, presentation, and other projects that use digital images.

To download the most current version of Picasa for FREE, click on the Organize your pictures. Get Google's photo software under Links in the right column.