- Quick specs
- Price: Free
- Operating system: Windows Vista, Windows XP
- Date added: November 20, 2008
- Total Downloads: 2,043,571
- Downloads last week: 9,785
- See full specifications
A newer version of Picasa is available.
(Download doesn't provide access to previous versions of this program.)
- CNET editors' rating: stars
- Average user rating: stars out of 637 votes
See all user reviews
CNET editors' review
Reviewed by: Jessica Dolcourt on November 20, 2008
This photo organizer strikes us as the picture of simplicity, a hairy task considering that Picasa 3 stacks on over a dozen more features and refinements to improve the editing, creative, and sharing options onto what has for years been a solid consumer app. Although not the most powerful image manager on the block, Picasa has the distinction of being the most easygoing.
Picasa's editing tools now include a retoucher to cover over blemishes and an improved red-eye corrector that detects and fixes all orbs emitting a magenta glow, with fairly good results.
Picasa really shines when it comes to organizing, uploading, and sharing pictures. New syncing and sharing buttons on the album level let you keep folders up-to-date on your Picasa Web album without leaving the desktop app. The same goes with its neighboring 'Share' button, which uploads photos online and e-mails your contacts the link from Picasa's interface.
The latest version also greatly improves the collage tool and adds a basic movie maker that lets you intersperse a wide range of video with stills. Though we love the concept, the bare-bones tool needs work, and greater choice of outputs--right now it only churns out WMV files. One other caveat: Picasa eats a lot of memory, so be wary of a performance drag, oh ye of modest memory. In every other respect, this free photo editor and organizer program is an excellent choice for amateur shutterbugs with plenty of photos to share.
Watch the CNET video review of Picasa:
Publisher's description
From Google :Transfer, find, organize, edit, print, and share images, all with this easy-to-use product. Watch Picasa automatically organize all your pictures into elegant albums by date. Having all your photos in one place means no more time wasted searching for folders or files. The program works with JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD, and movie files and is compatible with most digital cameras; it detects your USB driver and imports pictures into albums. Editing tools include cropping (standard or custom), removal of red-eye, and enhancing--even switching from color to black and white. Create slide shows set to your MP3s. Integration with Picasa's free Hello instant picture-sharing software lets you share hundreds of photos in seconds and chat in real time. E-mail photos with Picasa's built-in client to take the guesswork out of compressing images, and order photo-lab quality prints or print at home with no mistakes. You can also make instant backups to CD (or to other hard drives) of your photo collections, to organize your photos using labels and stars (just like with Gmail), to write captions for all pictures, and to organize videos as well as pictures.
Version 3 improves sharing and syncing online, enhances the collage tool, and adds a movie maker as part of a dozen changes.
What's new in this version:
Version 3 improves sharing and syncing online, enhances the collage tool, and adds a movie maker as part of a dozen changes.
More popular Media Management downloads
- 8,581 downloads 1. Picasa
- 4,270 downloads 2. Pictomio
- 1,558 downloads 3. Roxio PhotoShow
- 1,498 downloads 4. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
- 1,373 downloads 5. VisiPics
- See all Media Management downloads
User reviews of Picasa 3.0
- Average user rating: 4.2 stars out of 637 votes
- My rating: 0 stars Write review
-
Showing 5 of 21 user reviewsSee all 21 user reviews
This software version | All versions -
Version: Picasa 3.0
Pros: it's clearity
Cons: nothing any type
Summary: nothing in the product to avoid them
-
Version: Picasa 3.0
Pros: works fine
Cons: no dislikes
-
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
Version: Picasa 3.0
Pros: Great for editing and organizing pictures!
Cons: I like everything about it.
Summary: I recently added this program and am still in the process of testing all the features. So far I really like it!
-
Version: Picasa 3.0
Pros: This is one of the easiest programs I have used for editing pics!
Cons: nothing that I have found yet
Summary: I used this program to edit some recital pics of halloween, my pics came out pretty dark, but with this program I was able to lighten them up and crop what needed to be cropped...love this program!
-
Version: Picasa 3.0
"Photo-organizing muscle, but could be better."
Pros: Picasa shows your pictures in a snazzy interface. Advanced/confusing buttons or features are also kept to a minimum unless shown on purpose.
Cons: Can get laggy on computers with sparse memory. Unless you leave the media detector on by default, new pictures take about ten minutes before the software detects and shows them. Also, the implementation of features like tagging is not very well done.
Summary: A good product overall, and a must-have for any photographer or visual thinker. As mentioned, tagging needs work: tag searches showing incomplete results, and the tagging interface needs more work to make it faster for those used to del.icio.us-styl... read more >>
- See all 21 user reviews Write review
Submit your review
Previous Versions:
