Picasa 2 Launches

[Note - excerpt from InsideGoogle]

Picasa 2 is now available. Download it.

What cool features does Picasa 2 have?

• Make instant backups to CD (or to other hard drives) of your photo collections.


• Edit your photos, with basic fixes, and 12 lighting and color effects.


• Organize your photos using labels and stars, just like Gmail. Each picture can have an unlimited number of labels, bringing the same advantages of labels from Gmail to Picasa. Labels are so useful, that once you use them, you begin wishing every program used them. Don't be surprised if Google has made labels a "must-have" feature that will begin cropping up all over the place.


• Write captions for all pictures.


• Instantly order photo prints from various websites.


• RAW file support.



• Super-powerful undo button: Come back weeks later and undo any changes.


• Organizes videos as well as pictures. Picasa supports MPG, AVI, WMV, ASF and MOV files. You can play them inside Picasa, although there may be issues if you don't have the latest version of Windows Media Player.


• Zoom all the way into a photo, down to individual pixels.


• Flip through your pictures as fast as 30 pictures per second.


• Filmstrip, so you can see each picture in context with other ones as you work on it.



• A dynamic histogram, which "shows all the internal data your camera recorded when it took each picture".


• You can search by every type of variable, "a date, a name, a label, a keyword, the kind of camera you took a picture with, even a color, like 'blue'". This is the drop-down advanced search, which lets you limit to starred photos or videos, and has a cool slider that eliminates all but the more recent photos, but since it's a slider, you can select just how recent:

• Password protect your photos.


• Picasa supports the same format the Associated Press uses to embed photo captions into photos, ensuring that the captions stay in the photo file no matter what you do with them.


• Integration with Gmail, allowing you to send email direct through your Gmail account from the Picasa program, while saving the sent message in your Gmail so it becomes part of a conversation. Also, the send pictures app uses Gmail's address autocomplete.



• If you don't have Gmail, you can use any email account, but it is sent by secure SSL so you don't need to configure SMTP settings, a real headache saver.


• Automatic print settings for wallet-sized, 5x7, and 8x10.


• Froogle integration, so you can auto-search for supplies for your printer, if you need replacement supplies.


• Collage feature, combining multiple pictures into a collage. Also, it can simulate a multiple exposure.


• JPEG quality options, so you can downsample photos to save file sizes for publishing online.


• Picasa screensaver, which can display any photos you like.



• Export a sequence of photos as a movie.


• Doesn't automatically include PNG and GIF files, so you need to tell it to in the options if you need that.


• View a slideshow of images. You can set it to play a specific folder of MP3s during the slideshow, and even display a lower-resolution slideshow for slower computers.

Plus, look at this cool window that slides out of the side of your screen when it finds a new photo:

The photo editing tools are extensive. You get six basic fixes: Crop, Straighten, Redeye, Auto Contrast, Auto Color, and Fill Light plus, in perfect Google style, an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button that is a one-click autofix for almost all problems. There are four additional tuning features: Highlights, Shadows, Color Temperature, and a nuetral color picker. The 12 effects are: Sharpen, Sepia, B&W (black & white), Warmify, Film Grain, Tint, Saturation, Soft Focus, Glow, Filtered B&W, Focal B&W, and Graduated Tint. Many of the effects have further sliders to fine-tune the effect to your liking.

Picasa is now a video organizer as well, so you finally have the same things that are great about Picasa for video. Picasa 2.0 is a superb release, one that should be on every computer.