Picasa 3 Beta Screemshot Tour

With the new Picasa 3 beta recently released, I thought I would do a screenshot tour of it.

The main screen is largely unchanged.

There is a new photo viewer, which can run both fullscreen and not, and it is very fast, even for 8MP raw photos.’

Thumbnails can, as always, be resized.

You can filter by people, starred, and video clips. So for instance, the people filter shows all photos with people in them, which can then be searched or further filtered:

(Blurred and scaled down to protect the privacy of the people in the photos)

The editing tools are a bit easier to work with, and are organized in a better way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Blurred and scaled down so as to protect the privacy of those in the screenshot)

The collage maker now works quickly and easily, and produces pretty great results. In addition, Picasa now gets tabs when you tell it to make a collage.

A photo backup feature makes backing up photos to a NAS or to an external hard drive about as easy as enabling Time Machine on Leopard.

(Blurred and scaled down to protect the privacy of the people in the photos)

A “Blog This!” feature makes blogging a set of screenshots(or photos) really easy. If google paired this with a blogging client like Windows Live Writer, it would make photo blogging and screenshot reviews a lot easier.

Picasa can now create slideshow movies of your photos, with optional captions and cropping. The resolution goes all the way from 640x480 to 1080p. There is a good selection of transitions, and it can upload to YouTube. It can also play in full screen, and saves the videos as WMV. Creating a several minute video at 1080P on a 1.5ghz(downclocked) Core 2 Quad takes about two minutes(note it cannot really use more than 2 cores efficiently, so the same video would only take about 45seconds on a Core 2 Duo running at 2.8ghz.

Albums can now be synced to the web, so that changes in Picasa are reflected on web albums, now if only Google would let us use Gmail space for Picasa…..

There are now more options under experimental, such as creating a passport photo, and many more options for batch edit. Overall Picasa 3 is looking pretty good, and if you can’t wait for the final release, the beta is pretty stable, and available here.