Sharing Pictures with Picasa

Picasa is a free application from Google that helps to organize photos on your computer and it also allows easy uploading to a web album that you can share with your family and friends or you can leave your albums private - with the click of a button. They allocate 1GB of space to store photos on the internet and provide a way to see slideshows of your albums.

To start, you will need a google gmail account, if you don't already have one. To sign up for an account go to mail.google.com and click on the "I want my Gmail" link on the right side of the page. After you have a gmail account, not only do you have almost 3 Gigabytes of email storage, you also have a host of other free applications such as Picasa.

Now your ready to get Picasa, so sign into your gmail account and at the top of the page you will see a Photos link - click that and you will be asked for your password once again to setup your online album. Ok, so now you have an online album, all you need now is the Picasa software - go to http://picasa.google.com/download/ to get it. Install it to your hard drive and you're almost done.

Once installed Picasa will want to scan your hard drive for photos - just point it at the place where you normally keep your pictures. After it's finished, you can choose a whole bunch of pictures or just a few and click on the Web Album button at the bottom of the Picasa application. You may have to enter your gmail username/password here as well.

That's it!