Picasa offers a several collage options by selecting several pictures then clicking the “Create” menu, followed by “Picture collage.”
In the effort at keeping Picasa simple, it picks the order and display of the photos that will be placed in the collage. You do have some small measure of control, however. If you dislike the order of the photos, simply click the preview window. The preview will say “updating” and after a few seconds (depending on how many images there are in the collage) the photos will be rearranged.
On a picture pile, contact sheet or picture grid collage, the order of the images is changes.
On a multi-exposure collage, it will change the relative cropping of the images, if the images are different sizes, as in the following example (note how the borders of the image change):
Picasa has a full-screen mode that can be activated just by pressing F11. This works both on the library screen and the Photo editing screen. When you press F11 the start menu, header bar and menu bar all disappear and the application fills the whole screen. Handy!
Bonus tip: Completely unrelated to Picasa, F11 is also the full screen mode for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Cool, huh?
Picasa can also be used to watch videos. If you have video files in your Picasa watched folders, they will also appear as thumbnails.
On the user interface screen, there is only a play and Pause button, no Fast Forward or Rewind. However, you CAN Fast Forward and Rewind, you just need to know the right keys to press. So, here they are:
Here is a little known user interface feature in Picasa. If you are in Library mode (where you can see the thumbnail images) simply point your mouse at a thumbnail then press and hold CTRL+ALT. You rimage will be blown up to full-screen. Release the CTRL+ALT to return to the thumbnail view.
I just discovered today, this little application called Shutterclicks that can tell Nikon DSLR users how many times their shutter has actuated.
Apparently this information is caprtured in the EXIF information of the photo and this application reads that field. I checked in Picasa and in the Windows XP properties for the folder and did not see this EXIF tag.
According to Jon Oman, the creator of the app, the site hosting the download will go offline in Feb 2007 due to lack of funding. So get it while you can.
Along the bottom of the main screen in Picasa is the “Output Options” pane where you can have one click access to certain features, like creating a collage. or exporting pictures.
You can choose which buttons you want to display there by clicking “Tools” the “Configure Buttons”.
The Configure Buttons Screen will will appear that allows to you pick and choose. For example, I don;t use Blogger, so I removed the “Blog This” button.
If there is a photo you want to remember you can mark it with a Star. While there is a button on the screen you can click to add the star notation to the picture, or you can also just press the space bar. Press space again to remove the star. This is a super fast way to go through all those pictures you just pulled off your camera to mark the best ones.
Lots of people know that you can create a contact sheet for a directory using the Contact Sheet collage type (Create | Picture Collage | Type: Contact Sheet).
But you can also create one just for printing from the Library View. Just Select a Folder and Press CTRL+SHIFT+P
In a moment you’ll be taken to the print screen with a contact sheet created.
This technique allows you to maintain a rectangular aspect ratio while cropping on the “Manual” setting.
Select and image.
Click “Crop” from the Basic Fixes Tab
Press and hold the CTRL Key
Drag your rectangle.
Interestingly, the aspect ratio of this rectangle is not the same as any of the pre-set crop aspect ratios (4×6, 5×7, 8×10) — so if you intend to print in one of those sizes, use the preset.
If you are looking at a single picture in the photo edit view, you can quickly zoom in on a picture by clicking and dragging a diagonal line across the image.
Best explained in this super-short video tutorial below.
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