Jason Dunn
10-19-2005, 03:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.dpreview.com/news/0510/05101401picasa_21.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.dpreview.com/news/0510/05101401picasa_21.asp</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Google's free software program Picasa is now available in version 2.1, which adds support for RAW files from a number of manufacturers including Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Kodak, Sony, Minolta and Fuji. The new version also supports the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT (350D), Pentax *istDS and Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D (Dynax 7). The update also offers several new language options including Chinese, Russian, Korean and Dutch. Other new features allow you to publish an image to your photo Blog, print CD covers and find photos on external hard drives."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/picasa-logo.gif" /><br /><br />Picasa is perhaps the single best free Windows application on the planet: I think it's a great tool for beginner and intermediate photo users. The new version ads a few new features, but I don't see fixes for my particular pain points: red eye reduction with a zoom feature, support for online print stores in Canada, a real SAVE feature, and preservation of last modified dates. I do see that they have a new feature for external hard drives where Picasa will cache the image thumbnails and not need to regenerate them all if the drive is disconnected. I'm hoping this fix will also transfer over to Picasa's scanning of network drives. If you're not already using Picasa, <a href="http://picasa.google.com/download/index.html">download it today</a>.