As I’ve mentioned before, I love organizing. Books, stuff, files, closets–you name it, I’ll organize it! And this need to organize is not limited to physical stuff, no, I love organizing digitally. Being a pretty die hard MacGirl, I’ve utilized iPhoto for my personal pictures, and I’ve been generally satisfied. But as the yearbook coordinator this year, and as I’ve generally accumulated lots of photos at school, I realized I wanted something I could use on my school PC and easily sync onto the Internet. Enter: Picassa. I’ve had a Picasa account for a long time, but I only recently discovered its amazing powers! Oh, Picasa, how I love thee, let me count the ways!

1. FREE!! Need I say more? You can download the Picasa3 for Mac or PC to have as an application on your computer for absolutely free. It really is just as good as iPhoto, if not a leeetle bit more user-friendly! (Don’t tell my sweet little MacBook I said so!)
2. VERSATILE. There are so many things this handy little tool can do! First of all it will scan your computer for all your photos, it will even import all your iPhoto events! You can add tags, captions, people, and places. You can create albums, star pictures, and easily organize to your heart’s content!
3. WEB-SYNCABLE. Yes, I made up a new word, but it’s so wonderful! You can sync your pictures to your PicasaWeb account with the click of a button. And PicasaWeb  is actually a part of the beloved Google App family! (If you have a Google account you already have a Picasa account and didn’t even know it!)
   • There is also a Facebook Add on you can download so you can upload an album automatically to Facebook–sweet multitasking!
4. SHARABLE. You can embed, link, and share individual photos or whole albums. In addition, and this is very important for school, you can set your security settings to keep photos completely private.
   • I’m using Picasa to upload and embed all my pictures on this blog, it works really well,  is super simple, and saves my limited edublogs storage space! FYI: Picasa gives you 1GB of photo storage free, and then you can buy 20GB for $5.00/year.
   • Here is an example of an embedded album from my trip to Colorado…and there are a few pictures of my house :)

5. FACES. I was mesmerized when I first tried out the Faces feature on iPhoto, it scans your pictures and picks out the faces and then you label who is who and it will automatically find the faces of the people you identify. Awesome and futuristic! However, I was disappointed by how “off” it tended to be and how tedious it was to go through all the suggested people. Enter: Picasa. It has the same amazing Face recognizing capabilities in a much simpler and (I think) more accurate format. When it gives you the suggestions it also gives you the ability to quickly and easily scan the pictures and “Confirm All” or click a check mark or an X…easy-peasy.

The only thing that is that it is a little creepy to see the hundreds of thumbnails of only your face!

So, there is my rave review of Picasa, my new favorite organizing tool! I’m excited to use it this year with my kids, I think it’s definitely user-friendly enough for them to easily upload and embed pictures. Anyone have any photo software reviews? I have tried using Flickr, Photobucket, and SnapFish, but so far I’m sold on Picasa.