Picasa as (online) photo album
What is Picasa?
Picasa is one more of Googles highly advanced applications to collect all your fotos, to organise and search them, to edit pictures, to create slide shows, collages and movies and even to share them online with either only your family, your friends or the whole world. All available features can be found in the Picasa help files online.
How to get started with Picasa
During the installation process all folders on your hard drive will be searched for images which will then be added to the photo library. The pictures are already sorted in folders and in addition you may now create user specific albums to further structure your images.
Folders in Picasa
The folders shown in Picasa are the very same folders you use on your PC. They are the place where your pictures are stored. Changes of yor folders inside Picasa will also change the actual folders on your PC. If you e.g. move one image from one folder to another inside Picasa the same change will be applied in your PC.
Albums in Picasa
The so called albums are a convenient method for organisation purposes and do only existent inside of Picasa. That is if you have an album creating all your children images or your arts collection and then delete one of the images from the album the image will still not cease to exist in its original folder on your PC.
Upload images
You can upload your photos to the web using the software’s “Web Album” button. Instead you can also use your web browser to add images to your online account.
Specifications
Each Picasa account consists of 1 GB of storage which is enough to upload, share and view about 4,000 standard resolution images.
To install it on your PC you need Windows XP, Windows Vista or Linux additionally at least 256MB RAM and 100MB free storage on your hard drive.
Hint
Picasa doesn’t store the photos on your PC. Once you open Picasa it just takes a look into the folders of your PC and shows the images it finds. Only those file types are displayed which you have specified and only if they were located in the folders in which you were searching.
In addition Picasa never actually alters any picture. If you edit an image using an editing tool of Picasa the original photo will always be preserved. The edits are only visible in Picasa up to the moment when you decide to save your alterations. In that very moment a new version of your image is created leaving the original file untouched.
Download
You can download Picasa for free on the official Googel webpage.
Further Reading
One article putting together some very useful links for getting started can be found at the New York Times.
I also find a page with ome very cool video tutorials for Picasa.