Picasa Photo Viewer

[column]

What is Picasa Photo Viewer? Well, like it says on the screen shot down below it’s a fast, powerful image viewer for viewing image and photos directly from Windows Explorer*

* I’m not sure about OSX, but Picasa 3 is now available for the Mac so chances are it’s part of the OSX version too – someone let me know will ya?)

It comes as part of the new and improved
[/column]
[column]
Picasa 3 which was recently released, and since I discovered it it’s become my default image viewer – which for a graphics designer a reasonably important thing to have in the tool kit.

Up until now I’ve just been happy with looking at images in Windows Explorer, but it’s slow and clunky and doesn’t support the majority of file types I work with on a daily bases – namely Photoshop PSD files and TGA’s etc. I could use Adobe Bridge to view those files, and I sometimes do, but in 99% of situations Bridge is overkill if all I’m wanting to do is scroll through a few images and try find the right file I’m
[/column]
[column]
working on. I’ve used a few other apps in the past, but they’ve always been way over-complicated for just looking through a few PSD files.

So far Picasa Photo Viewer seems like the perfect alternative for viewing image files in Explorer. It’s fast, doesn’t struggle with big layered PSD files or large images and shows everything in a tidy LightBox style overlay above everything else on your desktop…
[/column]
[column]

[/column]
[column]

[/column]
[column]

[/column]
[column]

[/column]
[column]
Plus, if you’ve got a Google Account and have Picasa Web Albums set up, you can easily upload an image to your account with the click of a button. By default they get put in a “Drop Box” album, but you can sort them out and organise them online however you like.

All in all it’s a great little free tool that comes as part of the equally fantastic Picasa. If you’re fed up with Windows Explorer’s very limited image viewing options it can’t hurt to give it a try, can it?
[/column]