Organize your photos

The all-new Google Picasa keeps the same interface structure of previous versions, but features new enriching options to manage, edit, and show off your photos in an even more comfortable way, both offline and online – thanks to the Picasa Web Album syncing tool.

Picasa displays all your indexed photos in a handy folder structure. You can let the program scan the whole drive in search for pictures or select specific directories. A double click on any image will display it in full screen and let you access to a handful of basic editing tools: cropping, straightening, adjusting color and light or fixing red eye, among others.

New features

The latest version of Picasa includes a couple of exciting new features: facial recognition and geo-tagging. The first one means that Picasa can now scan your photo library, recognize and extract people's faces, and finally let you add a name to them. The process takes a while to get started – loads of faces to tag and names to write down – but if you go to the Unnamed tag under the People album, you'll be able to add new names and faces in batches and get the job done much quicker. As for the geo-tagging function, it's now easier to use thanks to the embedding of Google Maps in Picasa: simply select the photos you want to geotag, open Google Maps by clicking on the 'Places' button, navigate to the appropriate location and click OK.

We especially like Picasa's Photo Viewer, which you can configure to replace the original Windows default image viewer. It offers more tools and displays photos on a much nicer interface when viewing them directly in Windows Explorer, so when Picasa asks you if you want to use it, don't hesitate!

But Picasa is not only about viewing and fixing images. You can also give free rein to your imagination with its tools to create posters, collages, screensavers and even movies. The greatest thing about these tools is not only the fact that they give you the ability to create something unique and original with your photos; it's also that they're surprisingly easy to use, and don't require any tech abilities or photo editing skills at all.

Conclusion

The all-new Picasa has successfully completed what seemed a difficult task: improving a software app that was already very good.

Download Picasa 3.9.1.535 in Softonic

Applying such features can prove tricky in some programs, but not in Microsoft Photo Story. The fact is, you don’t need to tweak a whole bunch of settings because the program does it for you, automatically generating transitions and zoom/pans without you having to set it up yourself. What's more, the ones generated by default look great.

While you can simply sit back and let Microsoft Photo Story do everything for you, there's still plenty you can play around with if you’re feeling adventurous. For instance, you can build your own custom soundtracks for your slideshow. You can pick from a bumper range of music genres, tempos, instruments and effects, giving you the chance to match the audio precisely to the mood of your show.

Output from Microsoft Photo Story is in Microsoft's WMV file format, which is more compressed than MPEGs or other movie type files. You can choose from various resolutions in order to optimize your slideshow. Unfortunately, however, the output movies from the software are not as sharp as they’d be in VCD or DVD format.

It's a shame that Microsoft Photo Story does'’t support burning DVDs and VCDs with the created slideshow, and you’ll need your own DVD authoring app to do this. There are applications, such as ProShow, that contain burning options and support for higher resolution output, but there's not much that can match Photo Story in terms of its ease of use and automated features.

So, if you want a quick way to create stand-out photo presentations, Microsoft Photo Story is well worth downloading.

Download Microsoft Photo Story 3 in Softonic

Kodak Easyshare includes pretty much all the tools you would expect from a photo manager, such as being able to organize photos in albums, adding tags, retouching those that need a bit of optimization and sharing them in several ways. You can choose between burning them to a CD or DVD, uploading them to the Kodak Gallery and publishing them on YouTube or Facebook.

While Kodak Easyshare seems quite good at photo sharing, I found it a bit limited as photo manager. The range of tools is fine, but not spectacular and definitely not better than other similar apps. The program's interface design doesn't help either: it's confusing, a bit messy I'd say. On the upside, the program is thoroughly documented.

You can use Kodak Easyshare without actually having a Kodak account, however you'll find many places in the application where it encourages you to do so. Not having a Kodak Easyshare account will in any case limit your use of the application, as you won't be able to order printed copies of your photos or create projects.

Kodak Easyshare is a digital photo organizer that includes a bunch of tools to manage and edit photos, and also gives you access to Kodak photo services online.

Download Kodak Easyshare 8.2 in Softonic

This program automatically generates a Flash website that you can use to display your images on the Internet. There's no need to code anything in Flash or any other complicated programming language; you only have to select the pictures you want to show, choose the layout, add some optional background music and upload the whole project to your web space via FTP.

The downside to it, besides the obvious fact that you need an FTP space, is that the program, at least in my opinion, is not as easy to use as it seems at first sight. There are too many fields to be filled in and too many parameters to be tweaked. Being a program intended to users without any technical knowledge, I think the program should try to make the whole process a bit more graphical and more intuitive. Also, there are only two templates available.

Gallerymanager is the easiest way to create Flash photo galleries to publish online; it's a bit limited, but you don't need any Flash knowledge.

Download Gallerymanager 2.0 in Softonic

Using Hofmann Digital Album is very easy, thanks to the program’s step-by-step album setup process and intuitive customization interface. All you have to do is select a few basic settings for your album, such as cover, design and number of pages, and choose the photos you want to include in it. Note that you must select complete folders, not individual files.

Once the initial setup is complete, you’re ready to start customizing album details. Hofmann Digital Album displays your album in a multi-paned interface, with different areas for selected photos, album pages and extra effects – which you can apply just by dragging and dropping them onto the album’s page.

Hofmann Digital Album includes tons of different covers, page layouts, album backgrounds, clipart, masks and frames to turn your photo album into a truly personal work of art. The Preview function enables you to check the album’s final appearance before ordering it online.

With Hofmann Digital Album you can easily turn a collection of digital pictures on your computer into a fully customized printed photo album.

Download Hofmann Digital Album 8.1 in Softonic

The good thing about this tool is that it takes care of everything. The whole album creation process is totally automatic. All you have to do is select the pictures you want to include in the album, choose a template and export the result to HTML.

Being that easy, creating a web photo album is a matter of minutes. However, the downside to such an automatic creative process is that there's little room, if any, for customization options.

Download Web Photo Album 0.9 Beta in Softonic

Download Corel Photo Album 6.3.1 in Softonic

PhotoSynth is presented by Microsoft as an innovative and original way of publishing and sharing your photos on the Web. It's as easy to use as other photo sharing websites, only that its photo player includes special 3D features that makes PhotoSynth especially suitable for panoramas.

After logging in with your Windows Live ID and creating a PhotoSynth profile, you're ready to start using the program. Use the client to choose and upload photos, and then check your creation on the web browser (you'll need a special plug-in for this, but this is automatically installed with PhotoSynth). You'll be able to navigate the panorama in a three-dimensional environment by dragging and clicking your mouse around the stitched photos.

While Photosynth is definitely an easy yet impressive way to share your pictures online - especially with the full-screen viewer - it lacks all the social tools you find in other similar websites, such as being able to rate pictures or leave comments, just to mention a couple of them.

With PhotoSynth you can create, publish and share online your photos in a nicely design interface, with special support for 3D panoramas.

Download Photosynth 2.0.1403.6 in Softonic

I've tried every program going and whilst this is not the the best looking, it's certainly simple enough for anyone to use from parents to children and brings some semblance of organisation to your photo collection. The program works very simply - just select the pictures you want, select a template and watch Album Express assemble your creations in no time. You have some pretty basic navigation tools to look through your photos. However, it's not just aimed at novices because it also allows scripting plugins for those who know how to although the instructions about how to do this are frustratingly hard to find. If you can however, it allows you to build your own templates and display styles. One extra added little touch is that you can link photos to MIDI and WAV files for an extra touch of class.

It's all here for anyone who wants a simple but functional photo viewer although it's not really a touch on Picassa.

Download Album Express 4.0 in Softonic

JetPhoto Studio doesn't really compare with the big boys but it does offer a greater degree of control and processing power over your images in certain areas. JetPhoto Studio will import pictures from your camera as soon as you connect it. Alternatively, you can browse to albums on your PC or allow JetPhotoStudio to perform a full scan of your system.

The main interface is well presented and allows you to browse photos by date. There is a set of basic editing tools which allows you to crop images and add a few effects such as sepia, black and white, image contrast, and auto enhancing. You can also batch resize your photos and protect them with a watermark. JetPhoto Studio also enables you to rate your own photos via a star system, as well as tag them. However, tags are not transferable from one album to another and you have to create a new one every new album you create.

One of the better aspects of JetPhoto Studio is the ability to create screensavers, wallpapers, slide-shows and Flash movies from your collections. Unfortunately, however, there ¡s very little control over the types of animations and speed of the transitions. Finally, it's worth adding that you send JetPhoto Studio images via SMS or infrared, to your friends’ mobiles, although this only works within the US. The developer has also recently added geo-tagging for GPS recognition in Google Earth. The best way to share your photos in online though and JetPhoto Studio makes this relatively easy via Flickr or the JetPhoto server.

Jet Photo Studio is a comprehensive photo management tool that's a bit bloated in areas but offers some interesting features.

Download JetPhoto Studio 4.11 in Softonic

The only drawback is having to build the album itself, but this task is made easy with PixMatrix. This tool enables you to build an HTML photo album in no time, just by following a simple wizard. Then the only step left is to upload the album to your web space with the embedded FTP client.

Let's face it: the program's design is not really attractive, nor are the two hundred templates included with it. But at least it provides novice users with a quick, easy way of getting their photos online.

Download PixMatrix 2.1 in Softonic

The application provides a very robust system for handling large photo collections in a more efficient manner, and reminded me a lot of the excellent iPhoto on the Mac. All you need to do is connect your digicam to your PC and the rest of the work is done for you in terms of synchronisation and classification.

As the photos are imported, you can whip them into shape using a range of tools from the labs of Sony. As well as the ubiquitous rotation and cropping functions, you can perform colour and brightness adjustments, cut elements from images, treat red eye, etc. In terms of advanced editing features, it is lacking somewhat but to pick the program up on this point is to miss the point of Photo Go, which is to provide a means of collating and organising your pictures in one convenient place, which it does very well.

Download Sony Photo Go 1.0 in Softonic

The principal feature of the utility is its ability to import photos from any source (either on your PC or direct from your camera) and sort them into albums. Things are made easier thanks to the inclusion of an Import Wizard, making it great for those taking their first steps in digital photography. However, this method can get a little annoying after a while, and seasoned users are likely to be left dreaming of drag-and-drop capabilities, which are notably absent from PhotoMeister.

If you’re the type of person who likes to bore everyone with your holiday photos then PhotoMeister opens up a world of possibilities. The tools under the ‘Impress’ menu give you a plethora of options for sharing images, allowing you to insert them into web pages, slideshows, email, photo books, screensavers, PDA albums or burn to CD. Although the quality of the web album templates isn’t great, it provides a very quick way of sharing your latest escapades with everyone, with no technical knowledge required.

Image editing is not PhotoMeister’s strong point, and it’s lacking in the kind of advanced manipulation features you’d find in Photoshop Album or Paint Shop Pro Album. Having said this, it contains a neat one click optimization function, which auto adjusts the picture to make it as pleasing on the eye as possible. There’s also a batch conversion mode to help you speed up the process of applying a change to multiple images.

If you’re looking for something to help you manage and share your pictures more easily, Photomeister is great, especially if you’re new to computing. Just remember, that you’ll need an external image editor alongside it to get the best out of your digital pictures.

Download PhotoMeister 2.6 in Softonic