Free Photo Editing Program

I promised something more creative today and thought photos would be a good topic. I've been kvetching all week about my lack of a computer and my struggles dealing with Paint (piece of crap!). I started looking into free photo editing programs that might fit on my laptop and give me a few more options in editing. And since photos are a huge part of doing business online, I hope you find this interesting.

I found Picasa and checked it out. It's owned by Google and I could easily log in with my Google passwords. I was shocked to see I already had photo albums on the Picasa site! Huh??? Yes, I have albums there. Curious I explored a bit and found that the albums were tied to my blogs! What a trip down memory lane looking at photos from blog posts from years ago! I could also see where I struggled with Blogger from time to time...I would lose a photo cutting and pasting and have to reload it. Had I known about Picasa, I could have simply found the url of the photo and reinserted that into my blog.

So... if you have a blog, you already have a Picasa album. Go log in and look around!

This photo edited in Paint 8-(

Same photo edited in Picasa 8-)

I downloaded the software and while it's a bit clunky to someone accustomed to Adobe suite editing, it is way more useful than paint. I don't like that I have no control over dpi. It automatically reduces pictures to 96... which is too big for fast loading on web viewing and as a former professional photographer, I don't like putting large photos on the web.


I also love putting my own watermark on the picture. Picasa allows a typed watermark and places it in the lower right. Better than nothing but not as elegant as I prefer.

It has other options that are easy to use like red-eye removal, sepia tone, text, soft focus, etc. It's a good little program that doesn't take up too much memory on an older computer and it's easy to upload them to the appropriate album.

Hopefully, I'll have more beady things to say next week!