Using Picasa - Google's Photo Sharing Site

Picasa is the Google photo sharing site. On Picasa, people can share photos with friends and family or look at public photos.

Picasa has a search box that allows its photos to be searched. For example, a search for "Beach" returns hundreds of photos of the beach, much like Google Images.

The Picasa Photo Editing and Sharing Software can be downloaded for free. Photos on Picasa are tagged and listed under "Popular Categories".

A Gmail user can sign into the Picasa Web Album with the same email name and password.

In Picasa, a group of people can create collaborative albums. By adding contributors, an album can be made collaborative. Everyone in the group can then share photos and videos. Picasa is also capable of counting views, and offering the viewer the option to express the message, "I like this". The number of people who liked the picture is shown on the page.

People can share photos with other family members with Picasa and receive updates whenever a new photo is uploaded. Picasa calls this the "Suggested Favorites" option. Much like some of the social networks, users can also block other users whose participation is not wanted.

One of the fun things that can be done with Google Maps and Picasa is to arrange photos - for instance, of a vacation - on a Google Map.

Picasa makes the distinction between albums for friends and family, which have a higher level of privacy, and public albums that anyone can see.

The Picasa Photo Editor features many of the editing options of other sophisticated photo editing software. And it's free.

Picasa has some nice features that may be useful. It can automatically organize all the photos on a home computer.Geotags can be added to photos so that others can know where the picture was taken. The geotag option is useful for creating tour maps. Using Geotags is easy. First select the photos; then click "Places"; find the location on the map; click the marker button to add a place for the photo; move the marker to the right spot on the map; click OK. It's that simple.