VISIT: Picasa web site

I thought I was too old for new software. I write in Word 97 which is the software equivalent of an IBM Selectric. For readers under 20, the Selectric was a typewriter, which was like a computer with no screen or memory.

Last year Google purchased Piscasa, a software that sorts, sends and enhances digital photographs. It used to cost $30 until Google bought the California company and beefed up the program. Now it’s better, much better, and free.

Until yesterday I was using the photo software that came with my 10-year old digital camera. It was slow and simple and I knew how to use it. Picasa 2 is about 20 times better and takes about 20 minutes to learn. Picasa can find all of the pictures on your hard-drive, even if you cannot. It sorts them into folders and provides an awesome set of tools for manipulating them.

My hard-drive contains at least 5,000 of my own digital photos and thousands of other scanned images. Picasa scooped them right up and laid them into crisp thumbnails without affecting the files themselves.

You can add a blue sky to a gray day or make new pix look like old daguerreotypes in seconds. You can scroll through ALL the images at once without clicking from folder to folder. You can search for images, add captions, give them titles and key words. You can zoom in or out. You can straighten out crooked photos, sharpen fuzzy ones (within reason), remove red-eye, beef up flesh tones, crop, make collages or turn small pictures into giant posters.

That should be plenty, but this is just the runway. Google is intent on hooking us into an array of freeware. You can use their email (Gmail) with a huge free mailbox. You can send images to friends through text messaging or build your own blog site. Picasa is just one Lego in a giant software construction in a future Google universe. Their superb search engine was apparently just the tip of the iceberg.

While technology writers seem universally to praise Picasa, there is a nagging fear that this gift horse has something hidden inside. Google asserts that they cannot see what’s going on inside your hard drive. Maine writer Robert Oakley, like many of us, wonders aloud whether Google has some insidious endgame in mind. While praising Picasa 2 he recalls the joke about the scientists who programmed a huge computer to calculate whether or not there is really a God. The computer had insufficient data, so they kept feeding it more info. Finally the supercomputer had enough data to answer the question – Does God exist? "He does now," the computer replied.

Other pundits suggest that Google is on a quest to overthrow the current computer deity Bill Gates, recently knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Those of us who are fearful of Bill and love Google wonder how we poor mortals will fare when the titans tuseel. No matter who wins when gods battle, in Greek mythology anyway, the humans get hurt.

Back in the late 1980s I bought a computer slide-making software for $3,000. It was the latest thing. My company was going to make millions off it. Then Microsoft released Powerpoint for a few hundred bucks and the bottom fell out of the slide-making business. Google seems intent on doing to Microsoft what Microsoft has done to almost everyone else. For now, with only the slightest hesitation, I wish them luck. You too should consider rolling that gift horse past your firewall and into your computer. If we’re all going to be assimilated anyway, it should at least be free and fun.