How I edit photos in Picasa… Cropping

1. Decide which photo you want to work with and double click it. It will open in the edit screen.
2. I’ve marked some useful info for you above… how to get back to the screen you came from, how to scroll through other photos in the same album, and where to find more info about the selected photo (like its name, date taken, size in pixels and MB).
3. Most important to us right now are the editing options on the left.
    
4. We want to crop my photo so I click on “Crop”, which will open that section on the left.
5. Now we need to decide on what size and shape we want my photo cropped. The roll down menu gives me lots of options. Manual will let me drag the cursor to any rectangular shape, while the other sizes will keep the cropped section in those proportions. You can set up custom proportions to re-use each time, too.
6. I like square photos on my blog so I often use the “CD cover” option.
7. Once I click on CD cover, it will suggest 3 areas to crop in that shape for me. If I click one (as I did below to show you) it will highlight that area for me to see. Then I can click and drag that highlighted area to adjust it until I am happy.
8. Click and drag a corner to make the box bigger or smaller. Click the middle of the area to move the cropping area without changing its size.
9. When I think I have the cropping box where I want it, I can click “Preview” to check that I’m happy with the cropped image.
10. Then I click “Apply” to crop it.
11. Don’t panic if you’re not quite happy. You can undo your crop or re-crop if you want to.
12. Picasa will save this now automatically so if you leave it there (as I’m going to do right now!) and come back tomorrow, the cropped version of the photo will be sitting there in the Library just where you left it.

I hope that helped you understand cropping.