The folders you see in Picasa’s Folder List are simply a mirror image of the photo folders on your PC. But you may find that Picasa’s window makes it easier to see more information at a glance. When you click a folder in the list, the Lightbox displays thumbnails of its contents, topped by a banner showing the folder’s name, and the month and year of its creation.
On the right side of the banner bar is a button labeled Actions. As the name implies, it leads to a menu of actions that you can apply to folders and the thumbnails inside your folders. You’ll learn about these different actions in the following sections.
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Note: You see exactly the same menu when you click Picasa’s Actions button or when you right-click anywhere in a folder that’s not a photo thumbnail.
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At most, the Picasa Lightbox shows only a few dozen thumbnails at a time; to see more, you need to scroll. Picasa’s scroll bar works differently from the standard Windows scroll bar. In the middle of the scroll bar is a single button with arrows pointing up and down. Drag the button, and the Lightbox scrolls through your photos. The farther you drag the button away from the center, the faster the thumbnails scroll by. When you release the button, it snaps back to the middle as though it’s spring loaded, and the thumbnails stop moving.
Picasa also has navigation buttons at the top and bottom of the scroll bar. The button that looks like an arrow scrolls the thumbnails a row at a time, while the button that looks like an equals sign scrolls the thumbnails a folder at a time.
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Picasa provides more powerful photo search tools than EasyShare, making it better suited for larger photo libraries. The program’s features and learning curve put it somewhere between Kodak EasyShare and Photoshop Elements. In other words, if EasyShare makes you itch for more, but Photoshop Elements (or its price) scares you off, Picasa may be just right.
Like EasyShare, described in the previous section, Picasa draws upon your Windows folder and file system, creating thumbnails of your photos that appear in its window. Unlike EasyShare, though, Picasa lets you act directly upon your Windows folders. When you move a photo from one Picasa folder to another, you’re actually moving the file in Windows. Picasa also gives you features like Collections, Labels, and Keywords that give you more photo-handling options than you get in Windows XP.
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Even though EasyShare’s organizing tools are simple and basic, you can increase your organizational firepower by adopting a few good strategies.
1. Use albums to divide and conquer your photo library
Albums are by far EasyShare’s most useful organizational tool. To create a photo library where you’ll be able to find photos in the distant future, create albums with descriptive names, like Aunt Elsie’s 92nd Birthday, or Oregon Vacation 2006. And, as if you haven’t heard it enough already, never hesitate to drag photos into multiple albums.
On the downside, EasyShare doesn’t support nested albums, so you can’t place albums inside each other like Windows subfolders. If you want to keep groups of folders together, name them like this: Dogs-Hounds, Dogs-Retrievers, Dogs-Mutts, and so on. That way, all your puppies stay together when you sort your albums by name (Albums Sort Albums By Name).
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As the name implies, Kodak EasyShare provides simple, straightforward tools for the casual family photographer. In that respect, it’s like the kind of cameras that made Kodak famous: point-and-shoot Instamatics with easy loading film cartridges.
Once you download and install the free software, you can do everything you can in Windows XP and more from within one program. There’s nothing else to learn or buy. And when you’re ready for some basic photo editing, you can do that in EasyShare, too. Best of all, if you’ve already organized your photos and folders in Windows XP, you can keep them stored the same way. Then, using EasyShare’s Albums, Favorites, and Captions features, you can subdivide and sort your collection in creative new ways without disrupting your underlying Windows folders.
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