Organise your digital photos with Picasa

Keeping photos used to be so simple. In the days of film-based photography, you were limited to 36 shots on a roll, and you could only keep as many photographs as you were prepared to laboriously put into photo albums (while the rest were stuffed in shoeboxes and hidden away).

Now, digital photography enables us to keep thousands of images on a single memory card, and your computer could hold millions.

This is fantastic but it creates a new problem: how on earth to store those images so that you can find them in future?

Keeping pictures that relate to each other in the same folder is a good first step, but you might still end up with folders with thousands of images and no easy way to quickly search through and find the one you want.

There are various options for keeping track of your images. Some, such as Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop Elements software, are expensive. But one of the best ways of solving the problem is totally free. It’s called Picasa and once you’ve installed it, you’ll never need scratch your head over a folder full of images again.

Sorting photos with Picasa

Picasa is a free piece of software from Google, and you can get it from Picasa's website. Click Download and the installation file will be saved to your computer. Double-click this file and follow the simple instructions to install the application on your computer. On the final screen of the installation make sure the box is ticked to run Picasa immediately afterwards.

As soon as it’s running, Picasa will offer to start rummaging through your hard disk and finding the images that live on it. You can choose between searching the folders where images are normally found – My Documents, My Pictures, and the Desktop – or to search the entire hard disk.

If it doesn’t find the folders holding your photos you may need to click Tools on the menu bar, then Folder Manager to select them.

When Picasa finds an image on your hard disk, it performs a few tasks to speed up finding and retrieving that image later.

It notes, for instance, where the image is on your disk, as well as when it was taken. This allows it to present all the pictures in a list, ordered by date.

To find pictures from a particular time, type into the search box at the top: try 2009, for example, or December 2008. All the images taken in that period will be shown below, allowing you to quickly scroll through. When you’re done, click the green Back to view all button at the top.