Grade : A

Cost Free

Picasa is one of my favorite photo management applications. I use it frequently on the PC. For me it is one of the easiest to use photo management tools on the market. I find the the ability to scroll through hundreds of photos in seconds a great feature. In addition to simple photo management it also has many editing and image enhancement capabilities. You can quickly crop, rotate, enhance, remove red eye, and many other basic tasks. Best of all it’s free.

Now this powerful tool is available for Linux users. I get excited anytime mainstream companies start to port things to Linux. It just means the day we truly have choice in operating systems is getting closer.

Picasa was originally developed by a California based digital photography company named Picasa. At that time they offered the software for a very reasonable price considering the quality of the product. If my memory serves me correct it was near $29. in 2004 Google purchased Picasa and began offering this very capable software for my favorite price, free.

Picasa is a program that manages most aspects of your digital photos, and videos. It creates and index of all photos and videos stored on your pc and organizes them according to your existing file structure, you can quickly scroll through many photos and get a good idea of what you have. It also will import your images from most cameras. As a photo management tool it is the best that I have seen. It is quick and easy to find photos. When viewing individual photos you can quickly ad a caption that is searchable. The search feature is most effective when you take the time to add captions.

In addition to the powerful photo management tools Picasa also offers an array of editing tools that are really quite effective. You can crop, rotate, reduce redeye, enhance, add effects, and more. No, it’s not Photoshop, but it can handle many of the quick fixes that are needed for many applications.

Picasa is also tightly integrated with other Google apps, like Blogger, and Google Earth. You can actually geo-tag to the location they were taken on Google Earth. The applications of this in the classroom can be amazing. You could take or download pictures and integrate them into Google earth so students can not only see the picture, but see it in context of the geographic location it was taken.

Picasa is not the only maker of this type of software, but it is one of the easiest to use, and is very effective. For the price, I don’t even think there is a close second.

• Google Earth- 3d earth browser (highly recommended for geography teachers)
• Picasa- Photo Organization and editing software (Very helpful for large amounts of photos)
• Google Pack Screen saver- Screen saver that uses your photos (Fun but not necessary)
• Google Desktop- search files and email on your PC (Very useful and fast, may not be necessary with new Windows-Vista)
• Google toolbar for IE (somewhat helpful but not necessary)

Additional Software

• Mozilla Firefox with Google tool bar (Great Browser for teachers, not necessary if you already use Firefox.
• Norton Anti virus (Remove from download unless you have no other anti virus, it is not good for system to run more than one anti virus, and chances are the one you have on your pc is better than this one.
• Ad-Aware- A good ad-ware removal program. (Keep this and run it)
• Adobe Reader 7 (If you don’t have this version it is worth the time to upgrade)

Optional Software

The Google folks may disagree, but none of the optional tools are very helpful. I would especially avoid Real Player, if you need to play Real content I’ll provide an alternative. in a later post.