However, such companies are now ensuring that their free versions of softwares are available for Linux. One classic example of this is Adobe Acrobat Reader. The company is not offering their proprietary softwares like photoshop for Linux, but they are surely offering their Reader (free software) for download on Linux.

Following this trend, Google which is a great advocate of Open Source is planning to target their products for Linux. Picasa 3 beta is a move towards this direction. So, I tried my hands on the Linux version of Picasa and I am really impressed because they are providing all the features in this version as they have for Windows.

Because of this now I am even closer to taking off Windows Vista completely from my laptop and only use Linux. The installation is as easy as it can get with the debian package manager. Of course deb will only work for debian based Linux like Ubuntu. It’s like installing Picasa using an exe file. In order to install Picasa on your Ubuntu (or other deb based Linux distro) follow the steps below.

1. Download deb package of Picasa here.
2. Just Double click the picasa_2.7.3736-15_i386 deb and you are good to install the package.

Launching Picasa
In order to launch Picasa go to Applications–>Graphics–>Picasa–>Picasa. It looks something like this:

Now you can enjoy your favorite picasa in Linux as well.

When all the attention was being given to Chrome another Googles product made it to the web, launch of Picasa 3 (beta), but obviously Chrome stole the show. Google also introduced some big changes to the softwares Web platform, PicasaWeb.

Some of the additional features that have been added in Picasa 3.0 are listed below

Name Tags – Now Picasa Web Albums will help you in labeling all the people in your photos and this would give you better control over your photos and let you organize and share your photos based on whose in it. An advanced technology is used to group similar faces together. You do not have to waste any time in tagging hundreds of people in your photos. Just tag them once and Picasa is doing the rest of the work for you. Isn’t that cool!

Watch the video to see a demo of how Name Tags work:

Sync to Web – Picasa and its integration with Picasa Web Album make’s it unique in its category of Photo Management Software’s.

You do not need to manually re-upload your photos each time you edit them. If you enable “Sync to Web” in Picasa, each time you make a change to your photos on your PC it will automatically make the change online.

The following changes would be synced to the WEB.

• Picasa 3 edits (Basic Fixes, Tuning, and Effects)
• Photos added or deleted in Picasa 3
• Captions, tags, or geotags

You can also disable the Sync to Web feature anytime by clicking on the button or by selecting Disable Sync from the drop down.

Retouch – I always wanted this feature in Picasa. You can use the Retouch Tool to remove those ugly stains or marks and it also helps in improving the picture quality. Retouch will also help you in retaining some of those old pictures.

Picasa Photo Viewer – Photo viewer is a light weight application for viewing images. Photo Viewer lets you to take a quick look at images without having to fully open the Picasa 3 program. Photo Viewer is installed with Picasa 3.

You need to double click on the image and the viewer lets you add stars, zoom in and out with your mouse scroll wheel, rotate, or proceed to Picasa 3 to make more extensive edits.

Direct uploading from the photo viewer to Picasa Web Albums or Blogger is also an option available.

Create Movie Presentation – Guess what! A combination of great photos and some music added to create a Windows Media file can become your first movie. The movie Maker in Picasa supports .mp3 and .wma formats. It also gives you option of Adding text to the photos, change the music, slide transition style and also the slide duration.

TEXT – This feature helps in protect and personalize your images by using the watermark and text Tool. The watermark signature will be placed in the lower right hand corner.

Apart from the additional features a few changes have been made to some of the existing features also. To read more about Picasa 3.0 and its features click here and here. To download Picasa 3.0 click here.

The following video talks about the lates enhancements of Picasa 3.

Click here to download Picasa 3 and do let us know which of the new features did you like the most.

Note:

Type in Picasa 3 in google and the second result is picasa3.com which is parked/spam, so at least we know one person who is really happy at the launch.