One week after announcing that it had snapped up Picasa, Google is promoting the acquired company on its home page, encouraging users to “download Picasa from Google” for free. Before the acquisition, Picasa had been selling version 1.6 of its software for $29.
- See PC World story: PCWorld.com – Google Gives Away Digital Photo App
- Get Picasa from Google: Picasa: Automated Digital Photo Organizer software, instant photo albums, sharing & printing: Download
I’ve been using Picasa for a few days. It’s one of the best (if not the best) digital image management programs of its type I’ve seen for Windows PCs. I would seriously think about using Picasa for routine image-viewing and -managing needs now instead of Irfanview which is an excellent tool I’ve been using for years.
Another cool program you can get from Picasa is Hello, an uber-instant-messaging program that lets you share images as well as text messaages. You can do that now with Windows Messenger and MSN; what makes Hello look more interesting is that it’s specifically designed for compressing, sending and receiving images over secure connections. It also integrates with the Picasa image application.
What really interested me about Hello is that you can post images directly to your blog (if you have a blog on Blogger or Blog*Spot – both owned by Google). Here’s how it works: Just use Hello to send your pictures to BloggerBot. BloggerBot will automatically resize your JPG pictures, add your captions, and publish your pictures to the web. You don’t have to resize pictures by hand, transfer files, format HTML posts, or even find a place to host your images – Hello does all the work for you. And, it’s totally free.
- Get Hello: Hello : Signup and Download