Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape[2] (which at that time may have resided at Idealab) in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004.[3] "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa (Spanish for "my house") and "pic" for pictures (personalized art).[3][4] In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa from its original author and began offering it as freeware.[3]
Native applications for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X (Intel only) are available through Google Labs. For Linux, Google has bundled Wine with the Windows version to create an installation package rather than write a native Linux version, but this version is severely out of date (the latest Windows version, however, can be run with Wine; see the Linux section). There is also an iPhoto plugin or a standalone program for uploading photos available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later.
Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web Albums (PWA) is a photo sharing web site from Google, often compared to Flickr and similar sites.It allows users with accounts at Google to store and share 1 GB of large photos for free. Storage is unlimited for photos 2048x2048 pixels or smaller for Google+ users, and for photos 800x800 for everyone else. Videos less than 15 minutes long also don't count towards the limit. After the limit is reached, photos are automatically resized.[17]
Users may upload pictures through a variety of ways: via the PWA web interface on supported browsers,[18] Picasa 2.5 or later[19] on Microsoft Windows, using the Exporter for iPhoto, the Aperture to Picasa Web Albums plug-in, Uploader on Mac OS X,[20] F-Spot on Linux, or through WAManager in the Amiga-like OS MorphOS. In both free and paid accounts, the actual resolution of the photo is maintained, even though a smaller resolution photo may be displayed by the web interface.
In Picasa 3 versions of the software, using the 'original size' upload option, pixel size remains the same, but JPEG compression is increased significantly during upload to PWA. As JPEG is a "lossy" format, some picture information (and quality) is lost. Picasa 3.6 added an option to preserve original JPEG quality.[21]
PWA uses an "unlisted number" approach for URLs for private photo albums. This enables a user to email a private album's URL to anyone, and the recipient can view the album without having to create a user account. This is done via an "authentication key" that must be appended to the URL for the album to be shown. The Picasa Help files say that private albums are not searchable by anyone except the user. Another visibility option named "sign-in required to view" is available. This makes the album viewable only to those with whom the album is explicitly shared.
Ads are shown on the free Picasa Web Albums accounts. The Terms of Service[22] permit Google to use the uploaded photos to display on their website or via RSS feeds, and also for promoting Google services royalty-free. Additionally, the terms permit Google to allow other companies with which they are affiliated to use the uploaded pictures to provide syndicated services. This allowance is perpetual and cannot be revoked by the owner of the photos.
Picasa Web Albums was first leaked on June 6, 2006.[23] When introduced, it came with 250 MB free space. On March 7, 2007, that was upgraded to 1 GB. As stated above, storage is now unlimited for small and resized photos. Users can also rent additional storage space (shared between Google services such as Gmail, Google Drive and Picasa Web Albums) from 25 GB to 16 TB
