Picasa : Ask Biography

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Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my house", and "pic" for pictures (personalized art). In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa and began offering it as a free download.

Native applications for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X (Intel only) are available through Google Labs. For Linux, Google has bundled Wine with the Windows version to create an installation package rather than write a native Linux version, but this version is severely out of date (the latest Windows version, however, can be run with Wine, see Linux section). There is also an iPhoto plugin or a standalone program for uploading photos available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later.

It was reported in August 2011 that Google would be rebranding Picasa as Google Photos.