Picasa 3.0 makes the heart grow fonder

Together with the release of Google’s new browser – Google Chrome – the corporation introduced Picasa 3.0 and the improved version of Picasa Web Albums, a photo-sharing web application which allows users with accounts at Google to store and share 1 GB of photos for free. Picasa Web Albums reached remarkable figures from its release: it is now used by millions of people from all over the globe who upload billions of photos everyday.

Photographs are the logical consequence of the human being’s vivid imagination and Picasa Web Albums makes them a public display of the free spirit. Whether they capture moments, ideas or perspectives, the most important thing they have in common is the fact that the person behind the camera is guided by the desire of sharing experience with friends, family, and why not, even strangers.
Preoccupied with a better way of sharing and enjoying our photos with others, Google has developed major technology upgrades for both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums.

Starters will most surely appreciate a brand-new feature called “name tags” because it allows them to quickly label all the people in their photos. That way, they can organize photos based on who’s in the picture. This “name tags” feature is the result of an advanced technology which makes easier the automatic grouping of similar faces together. You label your pictures and then you can create a slideshow, for example, with you and your best friend starring the pictures, or you can share party photos with everyone who appears in the photo album.

But the changes do not end here. The site has a new fresh look that does not contorts the clarity of photos and features a new “Explore” page where you can browse the most interesting content of the site, including “Recent Photos”, a near-real-time view of public photos added to Picasa Web Albums. Another possibility is for you to send photos to Picasa Web Albums via email.
In addition, because Picasa Web Albums has always been integrated with Picasa, Google’s free photo management software for your PC, the beta version of Picasa 3 is made public at picasa.google.com.

The main advantage of Picasa was always the fact that it made sharing photos look like a simple action, handy to all kinds of people, with more or less technical knowledge. In the given context, Google pretend to have made sharing a whole lot easier in Picasa 3; so easy, as a matter of fact, that users don’t have to bother at all. There’s a new “sync to web” button which synchronizes specified albums on your PC to the web. Therefore, whenever you edit or add photos to the album on your PC, due to this button’s function, the changes will automatically apply to Picasa Web Albums. Moreover, you have the total control over who can see your pictures and who can’t through the Picasa software itself.



In addition, there are new powerful editing tools to retouch and restore photos, that will help you detect and fix red-eye pictures, or to add text to your images. As if this wasn’t enough already, Picasa is now fun to experience, because the overhauled photo collages and slideshows give you the chance to be creative regarding composition and layout. It must not be forgotten the brand-new movie maker that blends photos, video, webcam capture and music, in order to create customized movies that you can further share on YouTube.

If you’re curious about changes Picasa Web Albums have suffered or anxious to find some hot new stuff about Picasa 3, you can do this on Google’s official blog, where there will be daily posts about its new features.

(Source The Official Google Blog)

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