I've been playing around with Google's Picasa 2, a photo-sharing web application, in the small hours of the morning. It is usually compared to programs like Flickr and Zooomr, neither of which I have tried to use. I'm just feeling my way on photo editing and organizing software.

I find Picasa2 to be a basic, user friendly piece of software. It is quite useful in begining the process of modifying my photographs taken with a fim camera so they can take on a published digital form. What I like about Picasa2 is that it is a one-click web upload directly from the modified images on my computer (modified with the basic tools of Picasa2) and then uploaded to my gallery.

I've started a Gallery of some of the photos that I've been uploading onto junk for code. The first album is entitled Robe; the second album is entitled Coorong; the third album is entitled Fleurieu Peninsula. Other albums will come online as I sort though my photos.

Picasa2 is free software. It also allows users with accounts at Google to store and share 250 MB of photos for free. It's enough to get me started. I'm impressed, even though I appreciate that it lacks the advanced-editing features included with the big photo-editing software applications like Photoshop.

After working with Picasa2 for a while I desire to be able to do a lot more close touch-up work and adjust specific color levels, similar to what one can with software such as Photoshop. Picasa2 pretty much sticks to beginner-level editing and it is not the digital equivalent of the old darkroom, since it only offers very basic editing -- and a way to organize all of the photos on the hard drives.

I've also decided to have a regionalism album ---representations of South Australia as a particular place ---to counterbalance a global culture and the idea of a global village.