With Google's purchase of Picasa last week, the art of photoblogging has just become a reality.

Picasa is the easy way to automatically post, e-mail or blog your photos without the hassle of creating Web pages. The program is also a great way to finally see and organise all the photos on your computer's hard drive.

While Picasa's ability to edit photos is limited (for that use Ifran, the best free photo editor on the Internet), it has the advantage of being able to scan your entire hard drive for images and create albums of photos.

Thus, in one easy program I am able to easily locate and see thumbnails ofphotos that I want, rather than flipping from file folder to folder.

If you share any of my habits, this is the application for you to use in conjunction with the editing abilities Ifran. I work on various photos at once, and have hundreds stored on my harddrive for future posting, editing or printing.

With Picasa I was able to spot all the duplicates and folders I had long forgotten about. With Picasa you can easily organise pictures and folders to a more respectable confusion. You can organise all the folders in Picasa by date, size or by name.

The program will also automatically update its display when you add new photos or create a new folder of pictures. This is the point at which Picasa becomes really useful. Load photos from the various folders found by Picasa into the program's 'Picture Tray'.

You can e-mail the photos in the PictureTray as a batch. Picasa also allows you to print up to four photos on a sheet of paper. You can also print a full contact sheet of thumbnails of the photos.

An option to have the photos printed at a regular commercial photo printer is available only for US residents. Note that Picasa will not delete or move the location of pictures saved on your computer even though you can reorganise them in the application itself.

But wait, it's the Blogging function that really interests me. While I have my own personal Internet site, I am a lax poster of photos, much to the dismay of my parents in Canada.

In May, Picasa announced a technology partnership with Google's Blogger service to make publishing digital photos faster and easier. For that you need another good piece of software called Hello, which is also made by Picasa.

With Picasa, Hello and a Blogger account you have all you need for posting photos on the Internet in batches or sharing them with selected friends. Hello is really an instant messaging client.

Instant messaging refers to the ability to share data and communicate with each other in real time through private online chat areas. With Hello you can create a list of other users you wish to communicate with. When a user on the list is online, Hello will alert you.

Then you can share photos and chat about them live using Blogger. Or you can send pictures to your blog on Blogger. Using Hello you can automatically resize your JPG pictures, add captions, and publish your pictures to the Web.

"Blog" is short for an Internet log or online journal, which you create on Blogger or another service provider. Blogs allow you to instantly publish your thoughts and ideas from anywhere. I have been using it for a couple days now and the whole system is a cinch to operate.

Pick out the photos you want using Picasa. Then press the 'Send-Hello' button. The Hello application opens up with the photos ready to post. In Hello you can post the photos so they are available to friends when they log on to the Internet. Or you can post them to your personal blog space on Blogger.

Yes, all of the programs and services are free and that is amazing because photos take up a lot of space. It won't last, so take advantage of the service while you can. Sign up for Blogger at www.blogger.com. Download Picasa at www.picasa.com and Hello at www.hello.com (I wonder how much Google paid for that domain name?).

My dear parents will now have more digital photos to add to their collection than they can cope with. Actually, the system is so easy that I'm going to get them to post their photos.

Contact Ahmed at editor@offshoreon.com. For updates on security issues go to www.SecureBermuda.com.