What's new in Picasa 3

The latest version of Picasa includes sharing on Google+, including sharing of name tags. You'll enjoy the range of new effects that have been added, allowing you to quickly make stylish changes to your photos. Side by side editing means you can keep an original copy of your photo for reference while you're making experiementing with effects and levels.

What's inside Picasa

Google Picasa features 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.

It includes Picasa 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!

How Picasa works

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.

The possibilities are endless

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.

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Microsoft Photo Story lets you drag photos onto a window, arrange them as needed, then provide custom narration, transitions, zooms, pans, audio soundtracks and/or custom auto-generated music, then export the result as a WMV file.

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.

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The Picasa for Windows 8 home screen is divided into 3 parts to access this content - Albums, Recent and Explore. When you look into the options, you'll see that you're able to view your images in slide shows, zoom in on photos, comment on them, view the exif data or share your pictures with a variety of other applications.

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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.

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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.

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You don't need any HTML or programming knowledge: Glenlay Gallery does the job for you. Simply select the pictures you want to add, choose a template and upload everything to your FTP space with the program's built-in client. The only drawback is that the program only allows selecting entire folders.

Glenlay Gallery is perfect for novice users thanks to its ease of use. It enables you to have a ready-to-visit web album in just a few minutes.However, I found the included templates a bit dull and I also missed having some more customization options.

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Download Corel Photo Album 6.3.1 in Softonic

It's really easy to nowadays to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of pictures you take. Between your digital camera, smartphone and scanned picture hard copies, you can soon be into the hundreds or thousands when it comes to digital images stored on your PC.

FileStream pcPhotos helps you get your photo collection in order by letting you create custom albums for specific groups of photos. Its easy to use interface looks a bit plain, but navigation is a snap. Just pick and choose photos and then import them to FileStream pcPhotos.

A nice, useful feature of FileStream pcPhotos is the ability to batch resize a group of up to 200 photos to make them easier to share on certain web-based accounts. Photos seemed to have retained a good quality upon resize too in tests, which is a nice plus. After resizing, you can also opt to rearrange the order in which you imported them into FileStream pcPhotos in the first place by simply dragging and dropping.

FileStream pcPhotos also offers some basic effects and editing functions to pretty up your photos. You can flip or mirror image photos, change color images to black and white, or even add captions, timestamps or watermarks. If you're not satisfied with your changes, one quick click will revert your photo back to the original.

Sharing is also pretty simple with FileStream pcPhotos. The app lets you share your finished albums via email, iTunes, Facebook or Flickr.

FileStream pcPhotos is a great choice if you're looking for a multi-purpose photo editing and sharing program.

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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.

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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.

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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. You can also download images from your favorite social networks like Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa.

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

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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.

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Photo! Web Album offers and easy way to create photo galleries for the web with an emphasis on being user friendly and usable. This makes Photo! Web Album ideal for beginners who aren't looking for anything that looks great but works quickly and in a straightforward manner. From the moment of installation of Photo! Web Album, you're asked how you would like to post your photos to the web via a built-in wizard which makes it simple to use.

There's no need to worry about hosting either - Photo! Web Album allows you to share your photo albums on the developer's own website although how much space you've got here is not clear but it's likely it's not particularly generous. What's nice though is that by using the Photo! Web Album service, you can edit your photo presentation and online creations from the Photo! Web Album desktop interface. All changes are made in realtime so there's no waiting around for the server to catch up with edits you make. Photo! Web Album also lets you add subfolders of photos related to another subject which means that it's actually a better way to organise your photos than even Picassa.

Basic photo editor, uploader and hosting in one, Photo! Web Album is a competitive solution for novices or those new to photo uploading.

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