Digital Scrapbooking Organization

By Nancy Keithley

Once you discover all the wonders of digitally manipulating your pictures and finding digi elements to add to and enhance your layouts, you may quickly be overwhelmed by the daunting task of finding the *right* thing when you need it. One tool that has really helped me with this issue as an amateur digital photographer; as well as paper, digi and hybrid scrapper, is a free download from Google called Picasa 2.

Picasa 2 will seek out all the picture files on your computer - be they jpg, png, tif, bmp, raw, gif, psd and movies (you pick which). It may also be set to actively seek new pictures in particular folders every time you launch it. Mine is searching for png files as I type this, since I forgot to check that when I set it up on my new laptop.

When you launch Picasa 2, it begins looking in the folders you have designated for new pictures and organizes as instructed - by folder name, creation date, size or recent changes. You can customize the Tree structure shown (amount of detail presented on screen) in the folder view.

Picasa not only makes it easy to search visually or by name for items, but it also allows you to make some changes to your digital or scanned photos, such as printing them in Black & White, Focused B&W or Focused color, and Sepia. You may also upload pictures to a web album to share or print. These and other features make Picasa 2 not only a great organizational tool, but also a handy tool to have on your machine if you work with digitally stored pictures.

System requirements are listed below, and Picasa 2 works well with Vista, too, although it is not listed. It *will* take some time the first time you launch it as it will be searching your system for pictures to manage, so I recommend starting it and going off to fix dinner :)

System Requirements
Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XPMicrosoft Internet Explorer 5.0+ Picasa 2 is available in English only.