Free stuff to write home about: Picasa + Hello

One of the best things about having a few large players dominating the cyber-world is that when they buy over promising online services with the aim of increasing their market share, they tend to offer it back to the public for free.

When Yahoo! bought Konfabulator (see earlier post), it became freeware. Picasa, a photo management software, used to be a paid-for service. Since Google bought it over in 2004, it has become freeware as well. More power to us.



I wouldn't dare say that Picasa is the best product for organising your photos because there may be better and more professional photo management software out there. But it works for me. The first time I loaded it up, it searched my hard drive for photos and automatically sorted them by date, and then by the folders I had created in my hard drive. So under "2006", I would have, for example, "Valentine's Day Lunch", "Christmas at J's", "Malacca", etc.

Adding keywords to photos is a breeze. All you have to do is to use your mouse to select the photos you want with the Ctrl key held down, go to "keywords" under "view", and type in your keywords. The next time you want to find, say, a good picture of your mother to send to your family, all you have to do is to type the keyword you had set into the search bar (`mum') and it'll pull out all her beautiful photos.

Picasa also makes batch editing easy. Under "Picture" and "Batch Edit", you can apply all of these effects to a large number of photos at the same time: batch rename, rotate, auto colour, auto contrast, sepia, warmify, black and white, and "I'm feeling lucky" which I assume does auto colour and contrast.

Picasa also has a useful bag of tools for you to edit your photo with. You can crop, straighten, undo red eye, etc without having to use a resource-heavy photo editing software. It also saves the original for you in case you change your mind.



Picasa is cool, but Hello is even cooler. Hello is a photo sharing software that is nothing like flickr. Flickr is awesome when you want to share your photos with the world. Hello is impressive when your sister is online halfway across the world and you want to show her ALL your photos of your recent mahjong party, including the ones of you holding out a thong (i.e. not safe for public consumption), and she wants to show you pictures of her dog, both at the same time.

It is blazingly fast. It isn't like sending a picture via MSN where you click, wait for the other party to click, wait, wait some more, then "hey, cool! nice pic! what were we talking about again?" Hello sends photos boom! boom! boom! Literally that quick. Just drag and drop. And you get to see what the other party is looking at so when your sister says "What nice legs!" (we use skype so that we can chat while looking at photos), you can check to see if she is really talking about your legs before grinning to the moon.

And this is really fun: it tickles us to no end every time. Using any of the following in the chat box on Hello will give you a different falling emoticon.

:)
:(
;)
:P
:o
:| (our fav)
<:)
lol
love



What fun. :) The best thing is that when you are done talking and laughing over the photos, all the photos that your sister sent to you is conveniently saved for you in the section "from hello" in a folder titled "from your sister" in Picasa.

It really doesn't get better than this.