Picasa - Image Management Software by Google

Picasa, software for comprehensively locating and organizing images on a computer system, is also available for Linux. Picasa's main objective is to help you to get the large quantity of photos under control that you may have downloaded from your digital camera. The first thing it does after you install it and start it up, is to find every picture on your computer and to organize them by folders and dates.

The key functions of Picasa are:

1. convenient moving and renaming of pictures;
2. group pictures with a label;
3. mark the best pictures with a star and display only those that are marked;
4. include the same picture in multiple albums;
5. make slide shows;
6. selective use of password protection for viewing pictures through Picasa.

Additionally, the software includes various editing functions to improve image quality or appearance. Printing options include resizing to fit special print paper and printing multiple pictures on a page. Photos can also be uploaded to online photo printing services. When sending photos through email, image sizes are adjusted to be viewable by the recipient. The backup functions copy your pictures to a CD or DVD.

While there are a number of alternative programs for image management available on Linux, such as Digikam, GThumb, F-Spot, and Gwenview, the Linux version of Picasa is interesting in that this software has been ported from Windows using a special version of WINE, the general purpose Windows emulation environment. It is included in the installation so that you don't need to install and configure WINE separately. Read more...