One of the first things we started working on was better controls for fixing pictures. We found people were using dedicated, huge image editors (the kind that take two minutes just to load) to just fix a color cast (when your camera turns a whole picture orange or blue), or tweak an underexposed picture (like backlit pictures where you can't quite make out someone's face). These huge programs give you lots of control, and they're great if you want to do really complex 29-layer compositing, but that's not what we do with 99% of our pictures.

And two minutes to get started, we decided, was just too long.

We made sure that there's some fine-tuning in Picasa 2. But for most of the problems, we found we could fix them in one or two clicks, so we've dramatically enhanced what you can do in just a click in Picasa 2.

And everything you do in Picasa is instantaneous—we worked really hard to make sure that every button or slider you touch shows what's happening instantly.

You can undo and redo your edits forever. Feel free to experiment because there's an undo button that will always take you right back where you started. That means you can shut Picasa down, come back a week later, and undo a change you didn't like.

We're also photography nerds, and we worked hard to bring back some traditional photography tools into Picasa, mostly found in our Effects menu. You can turn your picture to sepia in one click, but in two you can turn it into any color at all or change the color of the lighting using our Tint feature. You can also turn a gray sky to a blue one using a graduated filter, like the ones professional photographers pay $100 apiece for.

We've tried to simulate some looks from traditional black-and-white photography, so you can make your pictures look like a famous picture of Yosemite with a strong red or orange filter. And we've even taken some cues from film—our saturate filter makes blue skies blue and green grass green, and our "warmify" filter softens skin tones to make people look more natural. We've added soft focus and glow effects, which simulate the special lenses and filters that high-end wedding and fashion photographers use to make pictures look romantic.

We tried to make it easy to learn & try out all these things. You don't have to read through a photography parts catalog, and you can always undo. Always.

People also asked for zoom in Picasa. So now we let you zoom into your pictures to see real-live pixels, or just to see somebody's face close up. This is another "can't live without it" feature, so make sure you try it out. It's very easy and it's very fast.

We also added little things to Picasa's edit mode, like a way to flip through your pictures as fast as you want (30 pictures per second), a filmstrip so you can see the picture you're looking at in context with the other ones you took, and a really dynamic histogram, which also shows all the internal data your camera recorded when it took each picture.

Picasa's always had a strong backbone for searching. But in this version, we brought out search to the top of the screen. You can search for anything: a date, a name, a label, a keyword, the kind of camera you took a picture with, even a color, like "blue".

We also made it easier to find your best pictures, to find your movies, and to find recent pictures. You can see how cool our search is by opening up search and moving the "Date Range" slider, and watch Picasa filter your pictures as you move it.

But that's all gravy—what people asked for were better ways to organize. Picasa 1 had "Albums" that were a combination of what was actually in Windows and what was in Picasa. As you worked with things in Picasa 1, you'd gradually make the two things pretty different. People were asking, "Why don't things move on disk when I move them in Picasa?" and "Can't I have multiple copies of my pictures for free?"

So we fixed itàwe did all those things.

We split Albums down the middle, and we made "Folders on Disk" and "Labels". Folders are real things: you can delete them, rename them, move things inside them, and they'll change your disk like you'd expect.

But when you make a Label, the fun begins. Because you can put a picture in one, ten, or a hundred labels, and it's free. No extra space gets used on disk. This means you can label all of your cat pictures twice and have one version sorted by color, and the other sorted by first name. This means you can make a slideshow with pictures from ten folders, and keep it ready to play at a moment's notice, or burn it to a CD. It's making organization pretty obvious, and we hope you'll find labels as useful as we have.

You can also rename files on disk, a whole bunch at once really, and you can put the date you took the picture in the filename. And you can see the filename under each picture if you want to, too.

On a little note, we also had people ask for password-protected collections, so we made those. We can't figure out why they want them, though.

We realized too late with Picasa 1 that we had a way to say which pictures were your worst ("hide"), but no way to say which ones you like. This was a problem, because most people don't want to spend time talking about all the pictures they dislike. We needed somethingàmore positive.

So we made stars. Yes, we had 5 stars, 3 stars, 2 stars. And we ended up with just one star. But it's a really nice star.

We found that one star is the fastest way to pick the best pictures, your "keepers". 5 stars is too much to think about, too many choices. 3 stars is wimpy. One star is really good.

Good pictures tell stories. Sometimes you want to tell your own, though, and so we made it really easy to add a caption to an image in Picasa. Our captions show up in Picasa's slideshow, and when you burn to a CD, and when you make a webpage.

But we learned that when the AP newswire sends around pictures (as JPEGs actually), they put each caption directly inside its image, so it's ready to go to print without figuring out which caption goes with which picture.

The format they use is called IPTC, and so we support that format for all your captions and keywords in Picasa 2. You'll never lose a caption, even when you export a picture to a small size or send it over email.

On a related note, all the camera information (called EXIF) stays with your pictures as you export them from Picasa, so if you apply edits to a picture, you will still see the original exposure settings and the time you took the picture.

Picasa 2 takes a couple approaches to burning CDs. First, we realized that there are still a lot of people who share pictures by burning a CD (some of them have dialup at one end or the other, and some of them just have lots of pictures). So we made it so easy and fun to do. For these people, we made the Gift CD—it's a way to burn a whole folder of pictures in one click. So all you have to do is pick the folder you want to burn, click "Gift CD" and go.

But this CD we make, it's special. When you put it in another PC, it comes up automatically and plays a slideshow, and it helps you copy the files to the other side. It will even copy an installer for Picasa, so you don't have to download it again on the other side (remember the dialup thing?)

The other thing people want to do is make a backup—too many cherished memories are on your PC to trust to one hard drive. So we've made a more serious mode that lets you burn to a CD, DVD, or even an external hard drive. It remembers everything you've backed up before, and it can help you save newer files automatically. It comes with a nice restore program that you can use on any computer, so this feature is great for upgrading to a new machine as well.

We added support for sending email in lots of new ways. Actually, we've got two new ways to email. The first is great Gmail support, if you have an account already. We've got autocomplete from your Gmail address book, and everything shows up in your Sent Mail online. It works really well.

If you don't have Gmail, we've made a new service called Picasa Mail, and it works really the same way, but uses your own email address instead.

These services work really well if you take a computer with you on vacation, and you're always struggling with SMTP settings and configuring Outlook from a hotel.

You don't want to do any of that while you're on vacation. So we send secure email (over SSL) that doesn't need SMTP settings or anything like that, and just works great. We think you'll at least be able to send your vacation photos out before you get home.

And if you use webmail all the time, it makes things a lot easier than attaching files by hand.

People asked us for wallets, 5x7s, 8x10s, and so we added those. The print preview is now bigger, too.

We also made this magic button that does a Froogle search for your printer name, and discovered that it's a great way to find replacement supplies. It never messes up. So that's there if you want to use it. Froogle finds pretty good prices, too.

We actually put a huge amount of work into our "Order" button. It's based on some secret technology that we can't tell you about.

But what we can say is that we're able to upload to a very large number of print providers, and we're adding more all the time. This means that if you use Picasa, you're going to have choices, and if you want the best price, the fastest shipping, or the best quality, you're going to be able to shop around, talk to other people about it, and pick whatever's best for your needs. Picasa makes it so easy to use these services that you should at least try one.

We've integrated more closely with the Blogger service in Picasa 2. You'll be able to send pictures to Bloggerbot (our online robot that helps resize pictures and convert your thoughts to a website) in one click, and see your pictures online in seconds (with free hosting on blogspot.com). Bloggerbot has been around for a few months already, but we've made it even easier to get pictures to your blog.

We wanted to add some more fun options for Picasa 2, so you could combine multiple pictures together into a collage, or simulate a "multiple exposure" with your camera, or make any of these things into your desktop background. Our collage feature is turning into a really powerful space to mix and match pictures, and we think you'll have fun with it.

Our generic exporter now has JPEG quality options, so if you want really great exports or really small ones, you can get that now.

Picasa 2 has its own screensaver, and you can add pictures to it in one click. We also made a movie exporter, which turns a sequence of pictures into a movie. And we'll even slice up a picture for printing on multiple pages as a poster.

You really should go try out Picasa 2 for yourself already.

Thanks for downloading,
Michael Herf and the Picasa team

You can install the Picasa 2 application by downloading the setup.exe file from the Picasa Website (www.picasa.com), or by running the setup.exe file from a CD. You can uninstall Picasa by selecting Uninstall from the Start Menu in Windows.

Windows XP Notes: You must be an Administrator to install Picasa.