Picasa 3.6 now available

Most digital camera, even the inexpensive ones, come with their own bundled software. These bundles usually include some way to upload from your camera to a computer, a photo manager to browse photos on your computer and at least some rudimentary photo editing facilities. Often there are a few fancy add-ons like making calendars, posters, cards. At its simplest Picasa does all the same basic tasks as you camera bundled software, it doesn’t have the fancy bits. However what it does do, it does well and without fuss. It has been my preferred photo manager for a long time down. It free to download from google, so it you haven’t tried it yet, try it now.’

The best new features relates to the Collaborative Web Albums, which allow you to upload  to a friend's album right from Picasa. Before you freak out about internet security you have to invite collaborators to your own albums. So far I have found Picasa’s web album type of security good, and I do suggest family photos should not be made public. Uploading, sharing and the automatic face recognition can also become part of your single photo import step. All nice but of little interest to me. What pleased me most, in version 3.6, was a simple change that I have been waiting for for a long time. The ability to have a custom size crop. You could always do a manual crop (to any size you wanted)but if you wanted a specific aspect ratio it was fiddly trial and error exercise. I used to resort to photo.net