Guest Author - Adele Sweeney

If you're a keen clipart collector, you might find your ever-increasing stock of picture files getting hard to manage - so a clipart organiser is the perfect answer.

My personal recommendation is 'Picasa' - free software available from Google. Picasa is a photo organiser and editor, but for clipart purposes, some of the best reasons to download Picasa are...

Organise and Recover
All pictures on your computer, even ones you've mis-filed or forgotten about, are found and organised - it's a really nice surprise to find pictures you forgot you had!

Tags for Quick Finding
Easily find pictures later by using 'tags' or keywords with each image - e.g. tag all your festive clipart as 'christmas' and when you need to see what kind of holiday clipart you have, just type 'christmas' into the search box and you will be presented with all your christmas clipart!

Colour search!
You know the piece of clipart you want, but can't remember where it is or you didn't tag it...but you 'do' know it's a blue forget-me-not...search by the colour 'blue' and Picasa will show you all the blue pictures you have!

Basic editing
Basic functions like re-size and cut etc, but if necessary you can even re-colour some kinds of clip art image, or turn them into sepia or black and white if you prefer

Best Printing
Fewer printing problems because Picasa will tell you whether the quality is any good at the size you want to print at


Worried about what Picasa might do to your files?

To be anxious when working with your precious picture collections is very understandable!

First of all, as with any important files, you should make sure you have them backed up somehow before playing with new software. If something were to happen to your computer you have no worries because you have them safe elsewhere. This may sound patronising but it is easy to have thousands of image files collected so quick that the task of backing up seems enormous - but we would be gutted if they got lost.

Picasa organises your files 'virtually' - it doesn't touch them or move them - in fact if you make any edits in Picasa, they are not changed 'for real' until you 'save' - and in fact this is why your changes don't seem to work, because they don't affect the original file until you tell it to save all edits.

If you deleted Picasa, your files should remain untouched. And, there's always your 'trash' to reinstate any files deleted by mistake.

Once your pictures are all imported, you can use the backup feature in Picasa, which will prevent you losing your edits and such like.


Videos and how to Download FREE Picasa from Google