This is the stuff I love about Picasa for digital scrapbooking. If you don't use it already, you should!
Find any picture
A picture can be identified by Picasa five ways. (1) Its file name (2) Name of the folder it's in (3) Any words in its caption (4) Any words in its folder description (5) A keyword which has been attached to it (Ctrl+K). Type in a word you think will bring up the picture, and most of the time, it will!
Drag and drop
Minimize Picasa and place it over Photoshop. Drag the picture from Picasa to the Photoshop workspace. You can press and hold the Ctrl key to select more than one, then move all at the same time.
Look at brush JPEGS
It's easy to see what brushes you have and what folder they are in.
Enlarge paper to see exactly what it's like
Press Ctrl+Alt while hovering on pix to see the details and if you really want to use it. Great for scrapbook papers, as well as your photographs.
Identifying digital art are for a particular use
When you purchase a kit, put key words in your paragraph description. For example, if you like to do wedding books, write "wedding" in your description even if the paper wasn't meant for weddings. When you type in "wedding" it will bring up all the papers you have identified.
Make a collection for one project
Say for example that you're making a family proclamation book using pictures that are scattered all over your computer. When you see a picture you'd like to use, but it in a "virtual folder." (little blue folder at the bottom of Picasa and to the right of the photo tray) Then export that folder to your picture folder and name the folder for your project. Then you can upload all the pictures at once to the book publisher and save yourself a lot of grief uploading a picture here and a picture there.
Make an instant collage
This is great for your blogs, but could also make a quickie scrapbook page. Select several pictures and click on the collage icon near the top and to the left of the folder the pictures are in. Choose the type of collage you want from the pull down menu at the top, and choose your page format, then click "create collage." There are options for space between the pictures, as well as color of the space. If you don't like the way the pictures are laid out, click "shuffle pictures" below the collage and try again.
Designer gallery
A virtual folder of ideas. When you see a page you really like on the Internet, save it to a scrapbook folder called "Designer Gallery." Then when your mind goes blank, you can look there for ideas, and "scraplift" it for your own use.
Digital thumbnails
A virtual folder of your art kits. Each time you buy a digital kit, most likely it will have a picture arrangement that includes most of the papers and elements in the kit. Put that picture in a virtual folder called "Digital Thumbnails." Then you can browse through there to get an idea of which kit you may want to use for your scrapbook page.
Share with screensaver
Picasa must be open, then when you are anywhere else on your computer and you want to do a screen capture, just press your "Print Screen" key and it will be saved to a folder in Picasa. Then you can quickly email it, or do whatever you want. It's nice for sharing a page in progress.
Print photo book pages in wallet size for sorting
Example: say you have made enough pages for a photo book, but you want to play around with arranging them, etc. Select them all, and click on the print icon in Picasa. Choose "Wallet." Mark "shrink to fit" in print dialogue on the left of the page. Print and cut out.
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