Picasa is a digital photo organizer and editor, and when you add to it the Picasa Web Albums service, you have a terrific all-in-one set of tools to make managing your digital photo collection very easy. It is available for Windows, Mac (Intel Macs only) and Linux computers, and it can easily replace, or at least complement the native imaging programs that come with Windows machines (Windows Photo Gallery) and Macintosh’s (iPhoto). And while Flickr is probably a bit more mature in the online photo sharing service market, Picasa Web Albums is at least competitive. There is even an uploader program that is stand-alone or works as an iPhoto plugin, which makes it a breeze to get your images shared on the web. You also have the option of making images private to only certain individuals that you designate via email. Picasa continuously scans your hard drive for new images that you add to your computer, and it also works as an importer for most digital cameras. It provides many of the basic features for editing images such as resizing, eliminating red-eye, and even straightening and cropping images.

If you would like to integrate Picasa and Flickr you can install a button to do a one-click upload to your Flickr account. You need to download the Flickr Uploader program from the tools page. Then you will need to install the picasa2flickr plugin. The installation (instructions are here) copies a file with a .pbz extension so you need to install Picasa and the Flickr uploader first. Picasa has quickly become a favorite program in the New Media Center. We think it should be part of your toolkit.

Audacity is a free audio editor that can be used on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems. By itself, Audacity can record, edit and save uncompressed audio files, as well as add special effects. You can also convert sound files to MP3 format for use on web pages, to create podcasts, or to play on an MP3 player such as an iPod. You will need to download an additional file to perform the MP3 export, but it is easily installed on your computer. You can find further information about using Audacity on their wiki page (support site).

You can view a screencast (about 7 1/2 minutes) that will show you how to install and set up Audacity and install the MP3 export feature. You can also view a 1-page PDF document on how to record and save an audio file to MP3 format.

Latest version of Audacity

• Audacity 1.3.12 Beta

courtesy of FileHippo.com

Official Audacity website

http://audacity.sourceforge.net

VLC Media Player, or VideoLAN Client, is a program to play a wide array of video file formats as well as act as a video streaming server. It is a free, open source program that is available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers. We like VLC because of its universality, as it will play Windows video (.avi, and .wmv), Quicktime (.mov), Flash video (.flv), DivX and other MPEG4 formats such as h.264, as well as standard DVDs. It will even handle Real Player formats and popular audio file formats. It’s definitely a handy program to include in your toolkit.

Latest version of VLC

• VLC Media Player 1.1.2

courtesy of FileHippo.com

Official VLC Media Player website

http://www.videolan.org/