Pick Picasa 3

It seems Sciencetext has been caught up in a bit of a Googlefest these last few days with the launch of the open source web browser Google Chrome and now the release of version 3 of the free Google Picasa photo organizer and web albums updates.

I’ve been using Picasa for several years now and find it the simplest and quickest tool for locating any of the photos in my rather overweight (40Gb+) photos folder. Now, Google has announced big changes for its web albums system, which could make it a real rival to flickr. The key update is focused on how you share and enjoy your photos with other people.

One of the most useful features is “name tags” in Picasa Web Albums, which lets you quickly label all the people in your photos. But, there’s also a new explore page in Web Albums that lets you browse public content more easily.

However, Web Albums would be nothing (much) without the desktop tool Picasa to back it all up. In version 3 (beta), they’ve added a new ’sync to web’ button to make uploading whole albums much faster, there’s a bunch of new editing tools to compete with the likes of the super Fotoflexer and the free Photoshop alternative Gimp.

Some time soon, now, you can download version 3 of Google Picasa (beta) here. Initially, it seemed that Google had once again made a premature announcement and Picasa3 was not actually quite ready for release. It’s available for download now.