free is better than half-price

{all due credit to Pa Norell for the subject-line quote}

I was just trying to find a link from Google to Gmail (if it exists, I’ve got link blindness), and while poking around the site found a link to a piece of software called Picasa.

This nifty little program is so damned cool! It creates a central photo album/gallery of photos on your computer, and gives you very intuitive and quick tools for fixing red eyes, resizing, exporting/printing/e-mailing, and will work so that your original files are unchanged. There are obviously limitations to what it will do; the resize will only allow you to select from some predetermined settings, so it’s not a great tool for more complex graphics work, clearly. But for those wanting to pull digital pictures off a camera, crop and e-mail them, it’s brilliant!

They only have a PC version (sorry, Mac addicts), and it’s a free download of about 3.6 MB. Also, for those with blogs here at Blogger.com, you can use Picasa with another plugin called Hello to resize, export and post pictures to your blog. You don’t have to find a place to host them or figure out how to link them. How cool is that?!

{/commercial announcement — except, if it’s all free, is it really a “commercial”?}

PS: I’ve still got five Gmail invites up for grabs. 🙂