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.

Maybe you just use them for fun, to connect with old friends and make new ones, but many people use the internet and specially the social networks to make business connections; either way, you should learn how to manage your online social life.

The biggest hype at the moment is with both facebook and twitter.

While facebook is a fully interactive social network, that allows you to virtually share any piece of information on your wall, from pictures to video, to your latest scores in the endless number of games and quizzes available and any link you find interesting , while allowing your friends to “like”, comment or share your findings on their own walls. The concept is highly interactive and your own wall works like a highly functional blog. Facebook stetted a higher standard on social networking and brought web 2.0 to a new level. Its a great platform both for mundane activities and business ones alike

, many corporations have found that their facebook pages attracts a great number of traffic and they are indexed by the search engines.

Twitter is a completely different thing; all you can share with your friends are links and phrases of text. In your own page you can only have one photo and you want to share more, you need to “twit” the links; this is called micro blogging, because there’s limit of characters to what you can write; its great to keep your friends updated on what you’re doing and it’s a mix of facebook’s status updates with text messaging into the world wide web; it has also shown valuable to many companies businesswise, allowing for great professional contacts to be made.

Now that you know what are the best social networks, it might become easier to manage your online social life and don’t get lost in all the many options available. More on this topic will follow in future blog posts.

Firefox

Before we can come to the solution of your problem you will want to download Firefox which is a powerfull and free web browser. If you are not already using it chances are good you are missing out on an opportunity. Without picking on you with too many tech stuff just let me put it this way: Firefox is  a lot of safer than many other browsers and (which is more important) it is customizable. Which means you can add features you need and use and switch them off if you don’t find them helpful.

So go to the Mozilla homepage, download and install Firefox, which will take up to two minutes, make it your standard browser – no worries it will ask you so – and then come back here to collect your first goodies.

Download Firefox now.

DownThemAll

DownThemAll is a very advanced and especially handy feature which can do a whole bunch of things and will make your life a lot easier.

The advantages:

1. First of all it’s free!
2. It lets you download all the links or images on a website at once
3. You can refine these downloads by fully customizable criteria
4. It allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time
5. It can increase download speed up to 400%
6. No additional software needed

Download DownThemAll now.

How do I install it?

Once you have download, installed and opened Firefox you just use the link above and then click on “add to Firefox”. Firefox will then ask you again if you want to add this add-on where you will agree. Then Firefox has to be restarted, just let it do so. And now the add-on should be on and running.

Find more information on how to use DownThemAll here.

Why do I need this?

If all the advantages did not convince you yet you probably want to stick with your current browser or you’re just too lazy to implement it. But if you’re willing to give it a try I bet you will not regret it. It’s just another way to speed up your life to get some spare time with your children and/or your car. It’s a small window to a great opportunity to enhance your online experience which will ease your downloading process right away.