Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape[3] (which at that time was incubated by Idealab) in 2002.

Linux support was provided by bundling the Windows version alongside the Wine compatibility layer.

[14] Linux users can use other programs to upload to Picasa Web Albums, including Shotwell and Digikam.

For organizing photos, Picasa has file importing and tracking features, as well as tags, facial recognition, and collections for further sorting.

It also offers several basic photo editing functions, including color enhancement, red eye reduction, and cropping.

Images can also be prepared for external use, such as for e-mailing or printing, by reducing file size and setting up page layouts.

This feature is also available through the context menu of Windows Explorer, and provides a way to start the Picasa editor as well.

On August 15, 2006, Google announced it had acquired Neven Vision, whose technology can be used to search for features within photos such as people or buildings.

Google applied this technology for face recognition, and this functionality was launched on Picasa Web Albums on September 2, 2008.

[20] Neven Vision incorporates several patents[21] specifically centered around face recognition from digital photo and video images.

Since June 2007, Picasa can write geographic coordinates to Exif metadata, thus geotagging an image.

Hello by Google's Picasa was a free computer program that enabled users to send images across the Internet and publish them to their blogs.

It was similar to an instant messaging program because it allowed users to send text, but Hello focused on digital photographs.