Extra-Credit Post: Picasa Web Albums

Picasa is a computer mediated communication tool, which enables users to share, organize and store photos and videos on the Internet. I was asked to use this tool to share pictures for my job as a brand ambassador for the energy drink, Rockstar Energy Drink. The Rockstar offices are based out of California and this company hires students across the country to represent the brand and “College Brand Ambassadors,” thus this tool allows for supervisors to view pictures of promotional events that the brand ambassadors plan on their college campuses.

According to Picasa.google.com, “Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Sharing your best photos with friends and family is as easy as pressing a button!” ‘Picasa,’ according to Wikipedia, is a “blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for ‘my house’ and ‘pic’ for pictures (personalized art).” This site, which allows for users to view, edit and organize photos, was created by Idealab in 2002, however, was purchased and further developed by Google in July of 2004 and then began to be offered as a free download.

According to Picasa.Google.com, Picasa notes that one of their best features is ‘Beautiful Web Albums’ which “show your photos at their best. View full-screen slideshows, see your pictures arranged on a global map, enjoy playback, and more.” Picasa Web Albums (PWA) is a photo sharing website from Google, comparable to Flickr. Picasa allows for users to store and share 1 GB of larger photos for free. Smaller photos and videos less than 15 minutes long do not count towards this limit. This site is advantageous for users who want to share their photos via the Internet. According to Wikipedia, “PWA uses an ‘unlisted number’ approach for URLs for private photo albums. This enables a user to email a private album's URL to anyone, and the recipient can view the album without having to create a user account. This is done via an ‘authentication key’ that must be appended to the URL for the album to be shown.” In contrast, Picasa also keeps photo files and albums private if the user wants to be unsearchable and sets their personal settings to private. “The Picasa Help files say that private albums are not searchable by anyone except the user. Another visibility option named ‘sign-in required to view’ is available. This makes the album viewable only to those with whom the album is explicitly shared.”

Picasa offers many features for users who are looking to organize and edit their photos. According to the Picasa official website, this communication tool enables users to stay organized by “automatically [finding] all the photos on your PC, wherever they are, and will organize the, in seconds.” According to Wikipedia, “Picasa has file and tracking features, as well as tags, facial recognition, and collections for further sorting. It also offers several basic photo editing functions, including color enhancement, red eye reduction, and cropping.” In addition, for viewing your photos with ease, Picasa offers features such as slide shows, printing options and image timelines. Another advantageous feature that Picasa offers is adding text to an image, without altering the quality of the image.

Picasa uses keywords to keep track and organize images. This organization process is helpful for users when they are searching the site. According to Wikipedia, “Picasa has a search bar that is always visible when viewing the library. Searches are live, so that displayed items are filtered as you type. The search bar will search filenames, captions, tags, folder names and other metadata.” Finally, while searching and exploring this website, I learned something very interesting about this tool. According to Wikipedia, “Picasa also supports boolean operators for searching in much the same way as Google's web search. All search terms are required by default (as with the operator ‘AND’), and images tagged with specified keywords can be excluded by using the hyphen (as in the boolean operator ‘NOT’). For example, searching for family children -friends will cause Picasa to display all images with the keywords ‘family’ and ‘children’, but which do not include the keyword ‘friends’.” In addition, Picasa offers an experimental searching feature, which allows for users to search for images that contain certain colors by using the ‘color’ operator.

Another feature that Picasa offers is Face Recognition, which is technology that can be used by Picasa users to search for people or buildings in their photos. This feature was launched into Picasa Web Albums in 2008. A feature that is noted on the Picasa Official Website is the ‘focus on people.’ “People matter in your photos. Our technology helps you automatically organize your photos based on the people in them, and works in Picasa and Picasa Web Albums."

In addition, geotagging is a feature that was launched in 2007, which writes geographic coordinates to an image, using Google Maps. According to Picasa.Google.com, “easily add geo-tags to your photos so that you can remember exactly where they’re from using Google Maps.”

Finally, according to the Picasa Official Website, this computer mediated communication tool allows for users to be creative, “use Picasa to design and print beautiful photo collages, create fun video slideshows, add photo text or view your favorite photos on your desktop or screensaver.” They emphasize the ease of editing your pictures to perfection, “improve almost any picture with Picasa’s one-click fixes for common problems like red-eye, color, and lighting. Or use tuning and effects to make your best photos look even better.” And, lastly, sharing is made simple for the effective use for users of all technological skills, “publish your favorite photos online with one click. Create stunning online photo albums to share with friends and family, or public albums for the world to see. Get notified when you ‘Favorites’ post new photos.”

Resources:

http://picasa.google.com/mac/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa