Today, we continue to explore Picasa2. We have discussed how pictures are organized, stored and viewed. Now, let’s take a look at the bottom of the Picasa2 window. Here is where the really cool things are.
Once you click on a photo, the toolbar below the preview window becomes active. You will see buttons titled hold, clear, label, star, rotate clockwise and counterclockwise, print, email, collage, hello, blog this!, order prints, and export. On the very left, you’ll see the picture tray, where the pictures you have selected appear as you select them. You can also zoom in and out to see less or more pictures in the preview window, by using the sliding bar on the right side.
The first two buttons, print and email are pretty self-explanatory. The collage option is really cool. You can select several individual pictures, or a whole folder of pictures, and Picasa will create a collage from them. Once it is created, you can even select which one you would like to be in front. This is a great option to try if you want something unique for a scrapbook, for example.
The Hello button will take you to a place where you can share your photos with friends directly. You can send a photo directly to a friend, and you can both see it and talk about it. The photo that you send is also printable by both parties. You don’t have to worry about resizing, naming, and emailing it as an attachment, you just send the photo. This also avoids you having to have a web site of your own to share photos. For more info on Hello, click here.
Blog this! is an easy way to add photos to your blogger.com blog, if you have one. If you don’t have one, consider getting one if you are interested in that sort of thing. It’s a lot of fun, and it gives you your own spot for FREE to talk about whatever and share some photos. Be sure to add a copyright notice, though. I’ll discuss copyrights and other legal stuff in a future post.
The order prints button will take you to a screen where you can choose a printing service to order prints online. Some of the choices are Walgreens, Ritz, Snapfish, and Shutterfly. You can order prints here, and have them sent to friends and family wherever they live. They just pick them up at a store near them. You can also search for a photo service in your area or theirs, if you prefer somewhere other than the places that are mentioned.
The last button we’ll talk about now is the export button. You can pick and choose, based on the pictures available on your hard disk or a CD, and send a group of photos to another folder or location. This is handy if you have imported a bunch of photos and want to put them in separate folders based on subject matter. Pick all of your family pictures and creat a new folder called family. Then export them to that folder with one click of a button!
That’s about it for Picasa2, as far as the basics. For more information or to download, go right to the Picasa2 site. There are more things you can do with Picasa2, but the ones we covered are the ones that are probably used the most. You can also do some limited image editing with the program. If you’d like to hear more about that, let me know.