How to Organize Digital Photos on Your Computer (for Free)
What to do
- We recommend the free program Picasa (offered by Google) as the best way we could find to organize and view digital photos on your computer.
If you install Picasa, launch the program for the first time. Picasa will scan your hard drive for all your digital photos. Be patient, this process may take a few minutes.
Once Picasa has finished scanning your hard drive, click on any of the folders on the left hand side to see all the pictures in that folder. To view a slide show of particular pictures, click on a picture in a folder, and click the Slideshow button.
To edit a picture, double click on it, and use the menus on the left hand side to edit different features of the picture.
You can e-mail pictures by clicking the Email button below. If you use Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, you can press the specific buttons to send emails from those programs. However, you can also send pictures from a free Hello account. To get one, click on the blue Hello account and sign up. (We suggest using a registration e-mail for the process). Picasa automatically compresses pictures into a size that makes them easier to e-mail.
Picasa is rich with features. Our favorite is the collage feature. Select a couple pictures, and hit the ‘collage’ button. Fool around with the three fields (Type, Option, and Location) to make rich collages of your photos.
A little more
Picasa is the best way to display your photos on your computer, period. (Note: this is different than sharing your photos online).
Picasa is free, for a start. Second, it automatically finds and organizes the digital photos on your hard drive in an easy to use format. Don’t worry – from now on, every time you launch Picasa, it will scan your hard drive for new photos added, making life easy for you.
And Picasa is rich with features. You can edit your photos in all sorts of ways, like turning them black and white or mashing them together in a variety of collage formats.
To learn more about Picasa and how to use the program, check out the User Guide available here.
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