Picasa is a free software, provided by Google, which allows you to locate all the photos that you have on your hard disk and organize them into collections. Besides these basic tasks, you can also easily perform more advanced tasks such as creating web albums from your collections, printing your photos, or create a collage from your photographs. This guide will show you how to create a collage from your pictures using Picasa.

To begin, start Picasa by double clicking the Picasa icon on your desktop.

Once Picasa has started, you will see the screen shown below.

Select the folder which has the pictures you want to make the collage from and click the Collage button.

On this window you will see the “Updating…” message in the top part, and after a short time, the updated results as shown below.

Here you can choose the type of collage you want. The choices are Picture Pile, Picture Grid, Contact Sheet or multi-exposure. You can also choose the background which is set to Gray Background by default. The other choices are White Background, Black Background and Use Background Picture.

Here you can see the result of choosing the Use Background Picture option. One of the pictures is used as the background.
Finally, you can choose the location.

As you can see above, the choices are Save as Desktop Picture, which saves the collage as your desktop background, Current Folder which is the default, Screensaver Picture Folder and the option to choose a different folder.

Once you have made your choices, click the “create” button. A small window appears showing the message that the collage is being created. After sometime the collage is created, and shown inside the Picasa window.

As you can see the collage is shown on the top right part of the window, while to its left, you have options to further process the picture. There are three tabs, Basic Fixes, Tuning, and Effects. The Tuning Tab and the Effects Tab are shown below.

Using these tabs you can further refine the picture by increasing the contrast, adjusting the colour balance, or sharpening it, or give it special effects such as Sepia Tone or a Glow effect or a color tint. If you want to take the easy way out, simply click the “I’m feeling lucky!” button.
Picasa is a very easy to use program and is all you need to manage your photo collections.