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.

Download Picasa 3.9.136.12 in Softonic

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.

Download Microsoft Photo Story 3 in Softonic