The Machets’ Blog

Name: Picasa 2 Price: Free

For some time it has been very difficult to get your digital photos onto your computer, and then view and print them. Of course, a new digital camera comes with some very superficial software made by the manufacturer, but with it you are still not able to enhance your images by removing red-eye and lighting.

Google purchased an expensive program called Picasa in July 2004. Shortly after the takeover, Picasa became free. Since then, Google has released Picasa 2; the ultimate photo managing software for beginners right through to experts.

Picasa makes downloading photos from your camera to computer very easy. Simply connect the camera, and choose which photos you want on your PC. Once there, they can be easily categorised into folders. The best part of Picasa is probably how simple it is to edit the photos. Put in short, you can straighten them, rotate them, change them to black and white, soften them, sharpen them, add special effects, get rid of red eye in both humans and pets, and adjust the lighting and colour levels to enhance the image. Even better, most of these features are automatic; just tell it what you want and the computer will get to work!

Picasa makes it easy to print your photos, email them and put them online. When emailing photos, the program automatically resizes the files (so you can send many at a time, quickly). You can create a blog on Blogger and upload them there. Finally, you can copy them to CD or DVD; give them to friends or get them printed. You’ll save time at the professional printers and won’t have to pay any extra to use the editing features (like red eye and the others above).

Picasa is the best photo editing and management solution available. It makes editing and printing photos a breeze. To download Picasa, go to picasa.google.com

This video was created by Microsoft as an internal message for box developers. They wanted to show Microsoft employees that sometimes less is better. This video is quite funny; it is definately worth a look.

To view this video at its actual page, please go to video.google.com

Finally, after a couple of weeks, The Machets’ Blog is back online! We have been moving our domain name (machet.com.au) to a new server, and everything should hopefully go well from here.

Our blog should be going 10x as fast, as the MySQL server is now part of the hosting. Before we were using a free host that was gruelingly slow. If you spot any errors, please let me know.