When printing photos at home, it’s possible to adjust layout, borders, captions, and printer settings, among other elements. Follow these steps to print your photos:

1. Select the photos that you’d like to print.
2. Click the Print button in your Photo Tray.
3. On the next page, customize your printed photos:
   • Select a print layout for your photos.
   • For photos that are too big for the page, select whether you’d like to shrink them or automatically crop them to fit the page.
   • Choose whether you’d like to add borders and captions to your printed pictures.
   • Picasa uses your Windows printer settings. Click the Printer and Printer Setup buttons to adjust paper size, orientation, and print quality (Dots Per Inch – DPI).
   • To print multiple copies of a photo on a page, use the - and + buttons for the ‘Copies per Photo’ setting.
   • If you change your mind about printing a selected photo, click the Review button at the bottom of the screen. Select the photo you want to remove from the page you’re printing, then click the Remove selected button. Click OK when you’re done.
4. When you’re ready to print your photos, click the Print button.

When you resize a photo in Picasa, you’re creating a new copy with an adjusted image resolution (pixel count) and with all photo edits applied. The original photo on your hard drive will never be altered.

You can resize your photos by exporting, emailing, or uploading your photos to Picasa Web Albums.

Resize by exporting

Exporting lets you resize your photos while controlling the JPEG compression (image quality) introduced by your applied photo edits. The result is newly resized copies of your photos, saved to any location on your hard drive. During the export process, you can adjust both the ‘Image Size Options’ and the ‘Image Quality’ settings in the ‘Export to Folder’ screen.

• When selecting image size, choose the ‘Resize to’ option and adjust the size slider. The number of pixels you select with this slider determines the length or height of your photo (whichever is longer). The other dimension is determined automatically to maintain the aspect ratio of the photo.
• Select the desired image quality for your photo using the ‘Image Quality’ drop-down menu:
  • Automatic: Preserves the original image quality
  • Normal: Balances quality and size
  • Maximum: Preserves fine detail for large file sizes
  • Minimum: Yields some quality loss for small file sizes
  • Custom: Enables you to select your own value

Resize by emailing

If you’re sending photos by email, you may want to resize them in order to get under the attachment size limitation. To change the size of the photos you email from Picasa, please follow these steps:

1. In Picasa, click Tools > Options (Windows) or Picasa > Preferences (Mac).
2. Select the Email tab.
3. Use the slider to set your desired pixel size when emailing multiple photos. Use the radio buttons to set the desired pixel size for emailing single photos.
4. Click OK.

Resize by uploading to Picasa Web Albums

If you’re sharing a large number of photos, you may not want to upload all of the photos at their original size. When you upload images from Picasa, you can choose the upload size using the ‘Size to upload’ drop-down menu or else you can set your preferred default size for photo uploads.

You can sort both the order of folders and albums in your Picasa folder list, as well as the way your photos are sorted within a folder or album.

Sort photos

To adjust the way your photos are sorted within a folder or album, please take the following steps:

1. From the folder list, click on the folder or album that you’d like to re-order.
2. Click the Folder menu or the Album menu.
3. Select Sort by.
4. Choose to sort your photos by the following options: Name, Date, or Size. To reverse the sort order of name (Z to A), date (oldest to newest) or size (largest to smallest), just hold down the Shift key when you make your selection.

To change the order of your photos manually, you can also drag and drop photos to your desired location.

Sort folders and albums

To change the order of your folders and albums in the folder list, follow these steps:

1. Click the View menu.
2. Select Folder View.
3. Choose from the following sorting options:
   • Creation date: Newest to oldest.
   • Recent changes: Most recently updated first.
   • Size: Largest to smallest, by the amount of hard drive space taken up.
   • Name: Alphabetically, A to Z.

You can also access the sorting options by clicking the pull-down arrow menu in the button bar above your folder list, next to the folder structure buttons.

Picasa is very, very easy to work with.   The first time you open it, it will find every image on your hard drive.  Once the images are there, you will want to create albums to make them easier to find.

You can combine photos from multiple folders into a single album in Picasa. Photos that you include in an album remain in their original folder locations on your computer, even if you reorganize or delete photos from the album. To create an album, you can follow these instructions:

1. Select the photos you wish to include in the album and put them in the Photo Tray in the lower-left corner of the window.
2. Once all your selections are in the Photo Tray, click the Add Selected Items to an Album button on the Photo Tray.
3. Select New album. You can also choose to add the photos to an existing album in the menu.
4. In the ‘Album Properties’ window, name the album. Learn more about editing album properties.
5. Click the OK button.

Picasa is a software application for organizing and editing digital photos, originally created by Idealab and now owned by Google.  The best part about that is that it is now FREE for everyone.

Picasa is free to download, and Picasa Web Albums provides 1 gigabyte of free storage — that’s enough space for 4,000 wallpaper-size photos.

My next few entries are going to be tips on ways you can use Picasa in place of more expensive photo editors.

Here’s how you can get started right now:

Windows

Mac