Image Heven

Posted by Ella To, Test Engineer

One downside to revisiting old photos on your PC and editing them is that you have to remember to re-upload those photos to the web in order for your changes to be reflected online. Well… that used to be the case. With the new Sync functionality in Picasa 3 (beta), you can now sidestep that chore completely.

Picasa 3 allows you to effortlessly keep photos and videos you’ve uploaded up-to-date. With a click of a button, you can enable syncing of any album. This means that whenever you make a change to a photo or video in Picasa (that includes edits, captions, tags and geotags) your online copy of the album will be seamlessly updated as soon as you log in. If there are some photos that you’d rather not share, you can always suppress those photos from appearing in your album.

And here’s a power tip that can really speed things up: the sync feature also allows you to sync starred photos only — so if you use stars to single out the “cream of the crop” in your photo collection, this can make sharing your very best shots easy. Use the drop-down menu next to the ‘Sync to Web’ and ‘Share’ buttons to enable starred-photos-only syncing, or specify other sync preferences, such as upload resolution, etc.

Posted by Tara Morrison, Software QA Engineer

In addition to some of the other cool new features in Picasa 3, we’re excited to announce that you can now add text to your photos. You may have already spent time captioning your photo collection, but now, with the Text Tool, your words can appear directly on the photos themselves.

The Text Tool allows you to create multiple areas of text, while easily customizing how your text looks. You can adjust the font or layout, re-size, adjust the angle, and drag it anywhere. You can also edit your text anytime, so have fun experimenting.

To get started with the Text Tool, check out these examples and read some of our tips:

• Using a color that already appears in the photo can be a nice complement for your text.
• Add the same text to multiple photos (a watermark, for example), using the Copy Text and Paste Text options under the Edit menu
• Create a more subtle looking caption using the Transparency slider
• Create interesting effects by layering text, especially using different transparency settings

Posted by Clay Wood, Software Engineer

The new Photo Viewer that ships with Picasa 3 is quick and straightforward, so I’ll try to keep this blog post equally focused.

We designed Photo Viewer to be a better, faster image viewer. A quick double-click on any photo will give you a beautiful full-screen view (with Picasa edits applied) and puts a select few options at your fingertips: you can quickly rotate an image, star it, upload it to your Picasa Web Albums drop box, or play a slideshow with other photos from the same folder.

What else can it do? Tap the scroll wheel on your mouse to discover how nice it is to have a fast, smooth zoom at hand when reviewing your photos, or try the ‘More Options’ button to bounce an image to your printer, blog, or favorite photo editor.

Obviously, Picasa 3 (beta) can also do all these things, and more, but we know users don’t necessarily want to launch a photo manager or image editor every time they double-click a JPG. Most of the time, a lightweight viewer is all you need — we hope you’ll agree that our new Photo Viewer fills that need nicely.

A note on installation: You can add the photo viewer during the Picasa 3 install — it’s easy to revert to your previous image viewer later, if you’d like. If you’ve already installed Picasa 3, and originally chose not to use the viewer, but now want to give it a try, just go to “Tools / Configure Photo Viewer” in Picasa.

Posted by Mark Geller, Business Product Manager