As digital photos keep stacking up on our hard disks, a reliable image organizer is essential to declutter, browse, and locate them, not to mention fix any small mistakes made by cameras, such as unflattering lighting.
Picasa is Google's answer in this matter. Apart from the fact that it lets users view and manage photographs, the app integrates support for easily sharing albums with the public by uploading them on Picasa Web Albums (Google's image hosting website) and other platforms, among many other useful features.
The utility is free to use and very easy to install. Toward the end of the setup, Picasa offers to set Google as the default search engine in Internet Explorer, as well as to send anonymous usage statistics to Google.
At its first run, the program is prepared to search for pictures on the PC. It is possible to include only common areas like My Documents, My Pictures, and the Desktop, or to cover all parts of the hard disk instead.
The file types supported by Picasa are JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TGA, TIF, TIFF, WEBP (Google Chrome), and RAW photos. Associations can be made with any of these formats when it comes to viewing content.
The multi-tabbed interface has a clean aspect that makes it comfortable to work with. It has received some improvements since our previous review. Sorted folders are shown on the left side of the library, while the right one holds the thumbnails of all containing photographs. They can be filtered by starred images, faces, movies, and photos with geotag.
There are many types of sorting modes to choose for pictures, such as people by name or reverse sorting. In matter of directory management, folders can be deleted or moved to other locations.
Two predefined albums are dedicated to starred photos and screensavers, and new ones can be created by filling out information like name, date, music, location, and description. Moreover, current photos may be viewed in a slideshow or timeline, accompanied by basic navigation controls.
Several adjustments can be made to photos to improve their quality, starting with basic rotation and cropping. It is possible to remove red eye effects, straighten pictures, automatically remove color casts, apply a one-click fix for lighting and color, repair exposure without affecting colors, apply captions, as well as fix blemishes, dust, and scratches. Most of the work is done by Picasa with minimal user intervention, so previous experience with graphic editing applications is not required.
Additional image processing features focus on light, highlight, shadow, and color temperature fixtures and various applicable filters like sepia, black and white, glow, saturation. Some of the filters come with their own type of tweaks (e.g. hue and fade for heat map), while part of these edits may be applied in batch mode to reduce overall task time. Another important aspect is that the original and edited photos can be compared side by side. Any mistakes can be wiped clean via the undo button.
All pictures from a selected folder can be exported to an HTML page at a resolution appropriate for large monitors, web pages, email, and others. Meanwhile, selected pictures can be transformed into desktop wallpapers, posters, photo collages, screensavers, gift CDs, or movies, as well as published to Blogger and exported to TiVo DVR.
Media can be backed up on CDs/DVDs, sent via email, or uploaded to personal websites, Picasa Web Albums (up to 1GB size for free), or Google+ accounts (with or without name tags). Evidently, this requires logging in with a Google account. Uploaded items will remain private until shared with other users, and they will become accessible from multiple devices.
A folder manager has the purpose of monitoring specific directories for any pictures to include or remove from Picasa's library. The program contains a similar management system for people, thus allowing users to quickly locate only pictures with a particular person. If timestamps are an important factor to the photo library, then it is worth mentioning that they can be altered for any selected photos via EXIF data.
Picasa is customizable in many ways, especially when it comes to appearance. For instance, it is possible to zoom in with the mouse scrollwheel or by holding down the Ctrl key, make the Photo Viewer action bar automatically hide in full screen mode, disable background transparency, as well as enable color management. Duplicate files may be excluded when importing.
In addition, users may select the default email client (e.g. The Bat!, Google account), select a folder of music tracks to play during slideshows, edit printing settings, use proxies, as well as set the default uploading size for web albums and add watermarks, among many others.
The Good
The application is free to use, cross-platform (Windows, Mac), and compatible with all popular Windows versions (although not officially stated by the developer, our tests show the tool works well on Windows 8/8.1 too). Keyboard shortcuts and multiple languages are supported. It includes help documentation and automatically checks for updates.
Although the utility becomes fully-featured when an Internet connection is active, the photo management and editing features may also be handled offline.
A real-time search function is available for the library, regardless of whether the target is a file name, caption, tags, or others.
The Bad
Image editing features are only basic. Help documentation is not extensive.
The interface is not necessarily intuitive, and we had trouble logging in with a Google account during our evaluation (on Windows 8.1).
The Truth
Picasa remains Google's prized possession when it comes to photo management and sharing. Since it is free to use and sports some impressive features, users are welcomed to try it out for themselves.
14 DAY TRIAL // 
