Picasa is a software application for organizing and editing photos, originally created by Idealab and then bought by Google since 2004. In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa and began offering Picasa for free download. At the time of when Picasa was bought, the company's management team was made up of Lars Perkins as CEO, Mike Herf as CTO, and Dan Engel as VP Market Development.
Google Picasa applications[]
- Crop - To crop a photo to a different format
- Straighten - Fixing a crooked photo
- Redeye - Repair redeye flaws in a photo
- I'm feeling lucky - One-click fix lighting and colour
- Auto Contrast - Fix exposure without effecting colour
- Auto Colour - Removes colour casts automatically
- Retouch - Repair blemishes, dust and scratches
- Text - Add/Edit Text on a photo
- First Light - Adjust the ambeient light in the photo
Features[]
For organizing photos, Picasa allows you to import files from your computer, tag assignment, facial recognition, and many other editing functions such as text addiction, brightness and contrast enhancement, red eye reduction and Image cropping feature. Other features include creating presentations, printing, and e-mailing. Picasa supports JPG, BMP, RAW, GIF, PNG, PSD, TIFF, WebP and AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF, MOV formats.
Picasa uses the picasa.ini file and the IPTC standard to keep track of all keywords possibly assigned to each image. Keywords can also be read by other photo organizer software such as Adobe Photoshop Album, Adobe Bridge, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, digiKam, Aperture and iPhoto.
Picasa is also integrated with a search bar that, thanks to its filters, can find file names, captions, tags, folders, and other metadata. A search function is also included by coloring the image.
Before editing any image, Picasa creates a backup copy and saves it to the picasa.ini hidden file. This allows many changes without altering the original image.
Since June 2007, Picasa has integrated the geolocation (or geotagging) feature that consists in writing geographic coordinates through Exif metadata. This feature is described in the Picasa user manual.