Sort, edit, enhance and share your photographs for free, with Google Picasa - Tutorial 1 - Installation

Google Picasa is a popular free tool that can catalogue, manipulate and share your photo collections. The software has some powerful features for sharing images across the web that go beyond what is available in Windows Live Photo Gallery.

To install Picasa, first obtain the latest version from the Picasa homepage. Save the file to your desktop or somewhere where you can easily access it. Once the download is complete, double click on the file or choose "Open" from your browsers download manager. Windows Vista users may need to enter their administrators password and/or click on continue if prompted to do so by Windows User Account Control.

The following window will then appear:-

Scroll down to read the license agreement and if you agree to the terms, click on "I Agree". The following window will then appear:-

Choose a location on your computer to install the software to. The default location is correct for most users, so simply click on "Install". The following window will then be displayed:-

Wait a moment while files are copied to your computer. When the process is complete, the following window will appear:-

The installation process is now complete. You can optionally create desktop and quick launch short-cuts here by making sure the boxes are ticked or checked. You can also set Google as your default search engine in Internet Explorer (if you prefer your current search provider, make sure this box is not ticked/checked).

Finally, you can opt to send anonymous usage data to Google. Google use this data to improve future versions of their software and it is completely anonymous, but if you are worried about confidential data being transmitted, then make sure this option is not ticked/checked.

When you have finished making your choices, click on "Finish". Picasa will now launch (unless you deselected the "Run Picasa 3" option). You can now proceed directly to our next tutorial.