Yesterday on my post about Picnik, Lisa commented that she uses Picasa.  Good for her!  That’s another great technology to use.

Her comment made me think that maybe, just maybe, there are some of you grandmothers out there who don’t know about Picasa.  So, I am taking it upon myself to fill in all of you unenlightened souls and tell you about Picasa in comparison to Picnik.  Aren’t I nice?  After all, isn’t that what a digital grandmother would do?  Sure ’nuff.

As I mentioned yesterday, Picnik is a photo editing, scrapbook making online program that you use through your browser.  So if you want to edit a photo and add those scrapbooking type of elements, then use Picnik.

Picasa is more of a photo management system. If you have lots of photos on your computer, Picasa is a great way to organize and view them.  It does provide you with basic editing options such as cropping, eliminating red eyes, adding a soft focus or sepia tone, retouching blemishes, or adding text — to mention just a few.  But nothing cutesy.

Picasa reminds me a lot of iPhoto in that you can add geotags or name tags or other personally determined tags to photos. You can also put photos in web albums.  An, you can create collaborative albums where you can directly upload pictures to a friend’s album.

You can also create a Quicktime movie from selected photos.  You can’t fine tune your movie like you can in iMovie on a Mac.  Rats!  However, I think that I like Picasa for creating movies better than MovieMaker on Windows.

Here’s a little movie that I created in Picasa to show you what the end product would look like.  It’s 4MB and might take a moment to show up down below.  (Please disregard that there are two of the same picture.  A little technology gremlin sneaked the extra one in when I wasn’t looking.)

Since Picasa and Picnik have different purposes and both are free, I highly recommend that you take a look at both of them.  They can sure make your digital photo life easier — and more fun1

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