Picasa for sharing and managing family photos
A little while back I mentioned how much I like Google Calendar for staying on top of my busy schedule. Now there’s another offering from the Internet juggernaut that I recommend for any of you who want to share digital pictures with friends and family. Picasa, Google’s photo management system, provides the best of the online and desktop worlds by integrating web functionality with desktop photo management software.
Picasa catalogs digital images on your machine and offers file management, editing and image effects like red-eye reduction to help you spruce up your snapshots. Once you’re done getting them all finished you can upload your photos to online albums with the ease of a right-click.
Online albums may be set as public or private, which I like because I’m not keen on having my pictures out there for anyone to see. From a web album you can then send out emails to others, inviting them view your digital memories. I find this particularly handy because there is ALWAYS someone who can’t view the attachments, complains that the images are too big or your message bounces back because the file sizes are too large. With Picasa, all they receive is a link in their email to view the images on a website, not all the actual files.
Picasa has been very handy to me, as my wife and I have been receiving tons of requests for pregnant belly pictures. We’ve been able to share them very easily and can quickly accommodate additional requests; it only takes an email to share an album with another person. I can only assume photo requests will increase exponentially after the little sprout is born and am not going to want to deal with ad-hoc requests and trouble shooting email problems for those who aren’t tech or email savvy. I see Picasa as a big time and frustration saver.
Visitors to your online album can click on thumbnail images to view the full size or view them as a slide show. Even better, they can order their own prints online through Shutterfly or Photoworks, saving you the cost and effort of mailing out photos.
There are numerous other players out there in the world of managing online photos, but I give Picasa the nod for the full functionality of a desktop client with the ease and content accessibility of it’s online competitors. Again, the application itself is free and you get one gigabyte of free online storage.
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POSTED IN: Dad Resources, General, Parenting, Photos
3 opinions for Picasa for sharing and managing family photos
brent
Aug 22, 2007 at 1:08 am
worth noting is that your web album comes with an RSS feed - which means that people can use something like Google Reader (combined with Google Reader Notifier - Firefox plugin) to automatically view the photos immediately after you upload them.
Google has really made sharing photos easy - you hit the “Upload to Web” button on your computer, the photos get reduced and uploaded, your friends’ get a notification on their RSS reader, the images are shared.
Single click. I’m in love with google.
Bill
Aug 22, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Thanks Brent! I never even realized RSS feeds were built into albums. I love the whole solution, very easy and well integrated into the rest of the Google suite.
Capturing babies!
Sep 16, 2007 at 12:59 pm
[…] while back I posted about how feature-rich and easy Picasa is for sharing family photos. Since that time I’ve begun realizing that with a child on the way I will in fact need to […]
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