BANGALORE, INDIA: Google has released a public beta of its Picasa for Mac beta, desktop software to organize photos in one place, edit pictures, and share them online with friends and family.

This was announced by Google during the Macworld. Picasa for Mac makes it easy to manage large photo collections and helps users make professional-looking edits without any technical knowledge, including:

    * A drag-and-drop photo collage tool that gives users control over layout and content
    * A retouching brush to wipe out scratches and blemishes - and repair old photos
    * A slideshow movie maker that uploads users photo montage videos to YouTube with a click
    * Smart auto-cropping that guides users on how to zoom in on their subject
    * And, auto red-eye removal.

Picasa for Mac integrates seamlessly with Picasa Web Albums, Google's free photo-sharing site, which offers features like name tags, the ability for users to automatically organize and share their photos based on the faces in each picture.

People who already share photos on Picasa Web Albums will find that Picasa for Mac allows them to easily and quickly manage their online and local photo collections. Millions of Mac users have been sharing photos on Picasa Web Albums, and while Google previously offered a Mac uploader and iPhoto plugin for Picasa Web Albums, Picasa includes additional sharing features like automatic web sync.

Picasa for Mac "plays nice" with iPhoto, and takes a read-only approach to editing photos stored in the iPhoto library, duplicating files as needed, so that users' iPhoto libraries are never affected when they use Picasa. Avid iPhoto users who currently use our Picasa Web Albums Uploader plugin can continue to do so, although features like automatic web sync, photo collages, and more will only be found in the Picasa application, added release.

This first beta of Picasa for Mac matches the speed and most core features of Picasa on Windows, and we'll be working on more refinements to the Mac interface and feature set as time goes on.

Picasa for Mac is available for free download in US English at: http://picasa.google.com/mac/.