
- #Designate picasa photo viewer as default in windows 10 free
- #Designate picasa photo viewer as default in windows 10 windows
#Designate picasa photo viewer as default in windows 10 windows
Like Windows Live Photo Gallery, Picasa does a good job of identifying the presence of faces, and, once you tell it who a few of them are, it automatically groups them for your approval. You’ve got a lot of photos with people in them, and Picasa is here to help you sort them all out.

Personally, I prefer the way Windows Live Photo Gallery handles nondestructive editing, but both methods do fully protect your photos. When you do that, Picasa saves the photo as a new file, putting the original in a backup folder.

If you want to work with a photo outside of Picasa, you need to manually save those changes via an extra step. Picasa, however, doesn’t change your photo: Your edits are available only from within the “walled garden” of Picasa. The original photo is tucked away in a hidden location, so you can revert to the untouched original any time.

In Windows Live Photo Gallery, any time you make a change to a photo, those changes are visible both in Photo Gallery and in Windows itself, so any program can take advantage of your edits right away. That’s great, but the way Picasa protects your photos is quite different, and the distinction is worth noting. Like Windows Live Photo Gallery, all of these edits are completely nondestructive to the original photo. And unlike Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can add text to your photo, which is handy for adding a caption or indicating the date the photo was taken. You can also add special effects like sepia and soft focus. You can crop, straighten, remove red eye, tweak color and exposure, and fiddle with color cast and white balance. Even by those standards, Picasa has a good collection of editing tools. Web-based photo editors like FotoFlexer, Splashup, and Picnik can very nearly take the place of Adobe Photoshop for most people, in fact. These days, there is no shortage of superb editing tools available for free. Unlike Windows Live Photo Gallery, though, you can’t easily choose tags from a list to zero in on photos–you have to know the tag and type its name into the search box. You can also configure ten quick-tag buttons that let you assign your most common tags to photos with a single click. As you type, Picasa suggests existing tags to make the job easier. That said, you can also turn on the right-side tag pane (Choose View, Tags from the menu) and enter tags in the field at the top of the screen. You’ll see all the photo folders on the left side of the program window, arranged by year. If you tend to think about organizing your photos in terms of folders, you’ll like Picasa, because while the program does support tags, it feels like a folder-centric program. Like Windows Live Photo Gallery, Picasa doesn’t actually move or copy your photos it simply provides a convenient way to see the photos that you have on your PC.

So this week, let’s take a look at the latest version of that program.
#Designate picasa photo viewer as default in windows 10 free
But several readers asked me how Photo Gallery stacks up against another popular free photo organizer/editor: Google’s Picasa. And Photo Gallery’s extras–like Photo Fuse and panoramic stitching–are superb. It’s my favorite free photo editor and organizer I really like the overall design of the program, which makes it easy to organize and find photos quickly. A few weeks ago, I discussed five reasons why you should consider using Windows Live Photo Gallery.
