Picasa Provides Image Management for Lawyers
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How do you organize and manage your images? Do you name them by hand, search for them in “thumbnail” view, and lose track of them more often than not? Picasa is the solution for you.
Provided by Google, Picasa is a free program that can organize, manage, and edit all of the images on your computer. You can “label” your images, organize them into folders, add descriptions, search for them, print them, and much more. All from within Picasa.
How does it work?
Simply download Picasa, by clicking on the link at right. Then install the program on your computer. The first time you run Picasa, it will search for the images on your computer. Depending upon the number of images you have, this initial run may take a little while (I had ~1200, and it took about 20 minutes).
Once Picasa has indexed the images on your computer, you should see the folders in which your images reside on the left side of Picasa. You can move images within these folders (moves them on your hard drive) by clicking and dragging images to/from folders.
The neatest features of Picasa are its abilities to “label” and add “descriptions” to images. Perhaps you have images from a bar association event or conference. You can select all these by clicking the thumbnails on the right, then you can right click and select “Add label,” “New Label,” and type the name of the event. You can also add a description, such as names of people in the pictures, thoughts you want to remember, etc. All of this text now becomes searchable through the search box in the upper right. Cool enough?
Benefits for lawyers
When working with Picasa, several different applications for attorneys came to mind.
- Trial – Perhaps you have pictures you need to save or want to present during litigation. These might be pictures of damaged property, personal injuries of your client, etc.
- Deals – Organize pictures of property which you are buying/selling for a client.
- Paperwork – Do you have scanned images of law firm paperwork? Maybe these are digital copies of court papers, maybe they are firm bills, invoices, etc. Picasa can handle them.
- Networking – If you’re bad with faces, use Picasa to store an image of your contacts, so you can easily pull them up when needed.
I’m sure there are plenty of other uses that I am leaving out here. How do you use Picasa in your practice? Please leave a comment or drop me a line.
[tags]legal andrew, picasa, law firm, lawyer, attorney[/tags]
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