Know When Facebook Friends Delete You As a Contact

We are not Facebook Friends anymore. Know when your existing friends secretly remove or delete you as a connection on Facebook.

“X and Y are now friends on Facebook” – That’s the message displayed in your Facebook profile each time you add a new friend on Facebook or someone else confirms your pending request.
But the reverse is not true – you will never know when existing friends remove you from their Facebook friends list. The count of your friends will decrease but Facebook won’t reveal the name of the person who just unfriended you.

You can however play detective using a Facebook app called Unfriender – this will let you know when friends quietly remove as a connection on Facebook. They are extending the alerts to email and SMS as well.

The only downside is that Unfriender works only with friends that you have added after installing the Facebook application. Thanks Josh.
Update: The Unfriend app is now offline but see this new app to know when friends unfriend you on Facebook.

You can follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook Fan Page for more updates like this and You can also ask a problems related to computers or technology on Ask Tech Inspiration+ and get your solutions faster.

Read More

How To Read PDF Documents on your iPod or any Mobile Phone

You can read HTML Websites, Email Messages, PDF Files, Word Document or any Text File on your iPod, Mobile Phone using the free tool called ebook to images.
If you like to read Adobe PDF ebooks, Word Documents or text files on your iPod, cell phone or any other portable device that supports pictures, here’s an extremely useful utility.


Called eBook to Images, this 500kb tool extracts the text out of your PDFs, then converts that text into multiple images that very readable on the small screen.
You can change the text orientation, fonts and the colors to suit your reading style. The software also lets you specify the screen size of your portable device and generates images of the same dimensions.

The other option for reading PDFs on iPod is via the iPod Notes Reader that makes small 4kb text files of your documents and links them together.
Download “eBook to Images” at MerlinSoftware.com.
You could also consider use this tool for reading PDFs on your Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle as both support images. Or save Webpages and Outlook email messages as text and take them with you anywhere.

Read More

Dropped your Mobile Phone or iPod in Water?

How to dry your expensive mobile phone or iPod that got wet in the rain or you may have dropped it in a wash basin?

What is the next step that you would take if your expensive mobile phone or iPod gets wet in the rain or your drop it in a wash basin?
Such accidents are not very uncommon. Adam Curry once dropped his iPhone in the toilet. Venadium went for a swim while the iPod was still in his pocket. Leo Laporte did something similar to his cell phone. Virgo soaked his iPod when a bottle of Diet Coke fell over his trousers.
Since the warranty for most electronics, including cell phones, does not cover water damage, what can you do to revive that wet gadget ? The answer is in your kitchen.

Power off the device (if it’s not off already) and try to completely cover the iPod or iPhone in a bowl of rice. Rice being a natural desiccant will help absorb the excess moisture. Let it dry for at least 24 hours and DO NOT try to charge the device.
See video: How to Dry your Wet Cell Phone
This home-remedy is cheap and worth giving a try before you rush to the Apple store for a replacement. Ernesto from WP successfully managed to fix his wet BlackBerry phone after he left the device soaked overnight in a bowl of uncooked rice.
Related: Protect Mobile Phones with a Condom

Read More

BlackBerry Guide for Power Users

Become a power BlackBerry user with these lesser-known but very useful tips and other time saving keyboard shortcuts.

Do you want to be more productive with your BlackBerry phone? Well, if you don’t have the time to read manuals, here’s a quick overview of some great time-saving features, tips and lesser-known keyboard shortcuts that will help you do things quickly and more efficiently on a BlackBerry.
BlackBerry Guide for Power Users – Take full advantage of your BlackBerry smartphone.
Close vs Escape - If you are running a browser or playing a game in your BlackBerry and press the “End Call” key, the application does not get closed but is merely hidden from your view. Too many open applications will soon slow down your BlackBerry so make it a habit to close, not escape.
See What’s Running – To see a list of all open applications in your Blackberry, press the ALT key followed by Escape. It’s pretty much like doing an Alt+Tab in Windows to help you navigate through open applications or switch from one application to another.
Save Web Pages – When you come across an interesting webpage but have no time reading it, you would normally send a link of that page as an email to yourself. To save time, simply open the menu of your BlackBerry internet browser and select “Save Page” – that page will be added to your message list just like other emails. This is like a built-in clipping tool.
Type URLs and Email Addresses Quickly – When typing a web address (URL) in the Blackberry browser, type a space and it is written as a dot. To insert a slash(/), use Shift+Space. When typing email addresses, your first space is recognized as @ while subsequent spaces are recognized as dots. So labnol google co uk will be written as labnol@google.co.uk.
Delete Your Emails – If you are looking to clean your BlackBerry Inbox, press the CAPS key and scroll UP or DOWN using the wheel to select the email messages that you want to delete. If you want to completely clear the Inbox, press t in the Message view to move to the top and select “Delete Prior” – this will delete all your BlackBerry emails.
Signal Strength – While your BlackBerry will display the current signal strength as bars on the home-screen, hold down the ALT key and type NMLL – the bars will convert into real numbers indicating the exact strength in that area. Repeat the same keystrokes to switch to bar mode again.
Multiple Email Signatures – By default, BlackBerry will append a text signature to all your outgoing email messages that you have set through the BlackBerry Internet Services portal. If you like more personalized signatures, compose a new email message in your BlackBerry, go to “Edit Auto-Text” and set up multiple entries corresponding to your different signatures.
BlackBerry Clipboard – If you are looking to copy text from an email message and save that as a note, position your cursor in the email, hold the Shift key (left Caps) and roll the trackwheel. When you are done selecting, click the trackwheel to put that selection onto the clipboard. BlackBerry Internet Explorer has a special Select Mode to help you copy-paste text from web pages.

Convert Case without the CAPS key – When writing an email message, hold down the key of any letter for a slightly longer duration and it will automatically turn into a capital letter. To type an accent or a special character (like a => à), hold the letter key and roll the track wheel.
Stop Receiving Sent Emails – Every time you send an email from BlackBerry, you get a copy in your Inbox. To prevent this, setup a BlackBerry Filter.
Web Applications – Blackberry software like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo! Go, Google Talk, NewsGator, Picasa, etc. offer great experiences but they could drain the battery of your BlackBerry since these applications are constantly checking for updates in the background.
You may therefore want to switch to “manual updates” especially when running low on battery.
HTML Email – The current BlackBerry OS supports only text emails but the good news is the BlackBerry OS 4.5, due in few months, will support HTML email, YouTube and editing of Microsoft Office documents.
Erase Everything – If you are looking to sell your Blackberry phone or planning to exchange an old model with an upcoming version (like the BlackBerry 9000), it is a good idea to completely erase all your BlackBerry data. For that, go to Options -> Security Options -> General Settings and choose “Wipe Handheld” from the menu.
Prolong the Battery Life – You can set BlackBerry to completely shut down at a specific time and it will automatically wake up with the alarm (or any other time) – note that you won’t be able to receive phone calls when the phone is switched off so don’t turn off the device too early. Some more tips on improving the life of your BlackBerry Battery.
Move Around Web Pages Quickly – If you are reading a long (or very wide) web page, switch to the Page View mode that shows a view of the full website – use the scrollwheel to quickly navigate to any other area.
BlackBerry Resources -  To download free BlackBerry software, games, ringtones and themes, go to Built For BlackBerry, Blackberry Owners Lounge or their Mobile Portal.
Screen Capture – There’s no inbuilt screen capture application in a BlackBerry so I use Mobiola that can capture still images as well as a video of your BlackBerry activity. See detailed guide on taking screenshots of BlackBerry phone. The developer toolkit (SDK) also has a screenshot application that you can have for free.
Got a Problem – If you have a question or problem related to BlackBerry, you can seek help from the Official forums or the more popular CrackBerry Forums. You can also search their technical center for additional support.

Read More

How to Close All Background iOS Apps at Once

Learn how you can close all the background running apps on your iPad and iPhone. And you can quit apps without jailbreaking.
.<iframe width="526" height="326" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CGWQBjt95AY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
When you double-tap the home button of your iPad or iPhone, the dock will show a list of all the recently used apps and some of them could still be running in the background.
You tap and hold your finger on the app icon until it begins to jiggle and you can then press the red “minus” sign (screenshot) to close one or more of these background apps. If a particular app is not running, this action will simply remove its listing from the multitasking bar.

Close All Background Apps at Once

If you would like to close all the background apps at once, here’s a free app for iPhone and iPad that can help. You don’t even have to jailbreak your device.
Launch the app and then shake your iPhone / iPad to terminate every single app that could be running in the background. Alternatively, you can just pull and release the processes list (see video) to close all the background running apps at once.

Should You Quit Background Apps Manually?

If you are on Windows or Mac, you always quit applications that you are not using so that more memory (RAM) becomes available to front-running apps. However, you many not see any improvement in performance by closing background iOS apps.
Here’s an excerpt from a Q&A that Engadget had with Steve Jobs:

Engadget: How do you close applications when multitasking?
Jobs: In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.

John Gruber explains why closing background apps isn’t required:

The iOS multitasking bar is not like the command tab switcher on Mac or Windows. It is not a list of currently “running” applications. It is simply a list of your most recently used applications, whether they’re running in the background, suspended in memory, or completely inactive.

Exception – Kill the Misbehaving Apps

In the past, I have seem apps, especially games, that became unresponsive (freeze) and force-quit was the only way to get them working again. The Process Killer app mentioned above might be helpful in such situations though else you need not worry about shutting down suspended background apps.

Read More

Backup your Gmail Inbox Online

This tip describes how you can backup your Gmail mailbox online so that you have access to all your emails even if the main service is down.


If you want to backup your emails from Gmail to the local computer, enable POP3 access in your Gmail settings and then use a desktop mail client to download a copy of all your messages from the Google cloud to the local disk. That’s easy!
Windows Live Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird are some nice email clients that can automatically and easily bring your entire archive of Gmail messages offline.
Why you should backup Gmail to the cloud?
If you are not a huge fan of desktop applications or if you think that setting up a Gmail backup plan involves way too much effort, you can consider creating a backup of your Gmail account in the cloud itself. Before we get into the details, here are three situations where an online backup of Gmail messages will come handy:
Reason #1 – If your main Gmail account gets hacked (it happened to me), you will still have access to all your previous emails.
Reason #2 – If you delete an important email from your Gmail Inbox by mistake, you can easily retrieve it from the online backup. Google Apps Premier has Postini to restore deleted emails, here you’re getting that facility for free.
Reason #3 – If the Gmail service goes down (yes, it happens), you will still be able to read your older emails. Gmail outage won’t affect work.

Backup your Gmail Messages Online

There are three services that can help you automatically backup your Gmail (and Google Apps) email accounts online and luckily, they won’t cost you anything.

The first and most obvious choice is Gmail. Create a new Gmail account and under Settings –> Accounts and Import –> Check mail using POP3 –> Add POP3 email account, enter the email address of your main Gmail account that you want to backup.
Within an hour or so, the online mail fetcher program will pull messages from your main Gmail account and will copy them to your new “backup” account. In my limited testing, I found that Gmail’s mail fetcher left all the messages that were either “read” or have been previously downloaded by another POP3 client so it’s not “true backup.”
That brings us to another alternative – copy your Gmail mailbox to Windows Live Hotmail. While you can add a Gmail account to Hotmail using POP3 (just like Gmail’s mail fetcher), there’s a much better and reliable option out there for copying emails from Gmail into Hotmail and it’s called TrueSwitch.

Setup a new Hotmail account and TrueSwitch, an awesome web-based email account migration service, will copy all your emails and attachments from Gmail to your new Hotmail address. If you have a relatively large Gmail Inbox, the backup process might take up to 24 hours but you’ll get an email as soon as the transfer is complete.
Like Gmail, Hotmail too offers “expanding” storage so it can possibly fit your large Google inbox as well. You can then add your Gmail address to Hotmail (click “Add an email account” in the sidebar) and this will ensure that new messages that land in your Gmail inbox in the future are also saved in Hotmail.
That said, both the services discussed above have one common drawback – they’ll always backup your entire Gmail mailbox and you cannot limit the backup process to a specific set of folders (or labels in Gmail). So if you have a fairly large mailbox and don’t want to backup each and every Gmail folder (or label), try Backupify.

Backupify, as you know, can backup your online accounts (including Gmail) to Amazon S3 and a unique point about Backupify is that it lets you specify labels that should be included in the backup process. The messages are stored in the cloud as EML files that you can view inside Outlook or, you can change the .eml extension to .mht, and read the file inside IE.
Backupify supports XOauth so you can add your Gmail account to the service without having to share your Google Account credentials. They are not using a very practical format for saving messages but the advantage is that Backupify will scan your selected mailbox folders every single day for new emails and will archive them automatically.

Read More

Opera Browser Coming to iPhone

Opera will be showing a preview of their Opera Mini browser for the iPhone during the Mobile World Congress.

If you want to browse the web on your iPhone (or iPod Touch or the upcoming iPad), the only option is the built-in Safari browser because Apple, until now, won’t approve other browser apps in their iTunes store.
Opera, hoping that Apple will change their policy, has developed a version of the Opera Mini browser for the iPhone and they’ll showing a preview of this iPhone App during the Mobile World Congress that happens in Barcelona next week.
An email from Opera PR says:

“We are thrilled to offer journalists and partners an exclusive preview of Opera Mini for iPhone during the year’s biggest mobile event,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder, Opera Software.

Safari vs. Opera for iPhone

Opera says Opera Mini for iPhone offers up to six times faster download speeds than Apple’s own browser, and up to 10 times smaller data traffic.
The Opera Mini for iPhone will only be shown to members of the press but Apple will have to approve the app for everyone else to experience Opera on their iPods and iPhones.
That may not happen anytime soon as Opera is yet to submit their Opera Mini iPhone App to the Apple App Store for approval.

Read More

The Most Essential Tools for Presenters

Conferences have come a long way in the last few years. As a presenter or as an organizer, here are some useful tools and tips to help you get the most out of your sessions.
Conferences have come a long way in the last few years. People just don’t attend a presentation, take down notes, ask a few questions and leave but they expect something more. As a conference presenter, here’re some useful tools (and tips) that may help you get the most out of your session.
Once the details of your session has been finalized, set up a Google Moderator page  to get an idea of what people expect to gain from your presentation. They may also send you questions in advance through the Moderator’s page and, because time for Q&A  is often limited in conferences, you may address the most popular questions just after you are done with the presentation.
It will help if you can create a public Facebook event for your session. You’ll not only know who is keen to attend your session but as people RSVP the event, their action will help spread word about your event in their respective Facebook circles. You may also set up a separate Twitter list with handles of all people who are possible attendees as you can then easily keep track of all the chatter related to the event.
If you are speaking at a big conference, the organizers may have already set up live streaming for your session but if that’s not the case, go live yourself with the help of services like UStream or LiveStream. You may either use the web cam attached to your laptop to live-stream the conference or use one of their mobile apps to broadcast your session directly from the phone. If one of the attendees is kind enough to live-blog your session, you may suggest him to use Cover It Live or even Google Docs.
Here’s one time-saving tip from Seth Godin that you should try in your next presentation. Prepare a slideshow with photos of people who you would like to acknowledge (or thank) and run this slideshow in a loop ten minutes before your actual presentation while everyone is still busy finding their seats. This way, you get to thank people but without boring anyone.
If you would like to make your presentation more interactive, you can consider adding live polls to your slides. There are online services like Polls Everywhere where audience can respond by sending text messages and you can then show the poll results inside the PowerPoint slide itself in near real-time. Alternatively, you may also conduct quick polls using Google Docs – Google offers a mobile-friendly site for polls and thus, people can participate from their mobile browser itself.
Some people in the audience would be live-tweeting your presentation and if you would like to show those tweets on the big screen, you have two options. You may either get one of these PPT templates that use Adobe Flash to fetch tweets into your slides or the other alternative is Live Web – this is a free add-in that lets you embed any webpage into PowerPoint. You can embed backchannel Twitter chatter (say, search results for a hashtag), Google Moderator pages, and more.
The last slide of your presentation will mostly have your contact information – if you can put all this inside a QR Code, the audience can easily save your information to their mobile phones without having to type anything. If possible, make good use of Speaker Notes, invisible to the audience, to deliver a flawless presentation on the lines of Steve Jobs.
When you are done with the presentation, you can use a service like Speaker Rate to get instant feedback from the audience on your session. If people have been using a consistent hashtag to live-tweet your session, you can use Hashalbum and The Archivist to save all the pictures and tweets from your session in one place. You may also use Lanyrd or any of the other content curation tools to collect all the buzz – videos, presentations, links, etc. – around your session.
Some people will obviously want to have a copy of your presentation after the session. There are services like SlideShare, Issuu, Scribd and Docs.com where you can upload the deck though I would recommend that you convert the slides to PDF before putting them online to prevent modification.
SlideShare attracts the maximum eyeballs, Docs.com is very tightly integrated with Facebook, Issuu offers the best presentation player but one big advantage with Scribd is the “send to mobile” option – users can directly send your slides from Scribd to their mobile phone, Kindle, iPad, Nook or any other device for offline viewing.

You can follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook Fan Page for more updates like this and You can also ask a problems related to computers or technology on Ask Tech Inspiration+ and get your solutions faster.

Read More

What’s Coming in iPhone 5, According to the Rumour Mill

This neatly-done poster highlights all the rumors and news stories surrounding Apple’s next phone – iPhone 5 – which is expected to launch around September this year.

This neatly-done poster from French blog NoWhereElse highlights all the rumors surrounding iPhone 5 which is expected to launch around September. Bigger screen, higher-resolution camera, 3D support.. the wish-list is endless. Thanks GottaBeMobile for the tip.

Read More

Create a Unique Password for Every Site You Use

Learn how you can create unique and strong passwords for every website that you use without storing the passwords anywhere.

You want to create lengthy, complicated and unique passwords for every website that you use but that rarely happens in practice because these complex strings would be nearly impossible for anyone to remember.
Most people thus rely on password management software that encrypt and store all your passwords in a database which is protected by a single password. You enter that master password and you instantly have access to all your stored user logins and passwords.

There’s however another solution as well that will help you generate unique passwords for all your online accounts but without storing the passwords anywhere – neither online nor on your computer. It’s called Password Chameleon.
With Password Chameleon, all you have to do is remember one master password. You enter the site’s domain name (say gmail.com) and your master password (say He!!0WorId) and tool will instantly create a password by mashing these two strings. Every time you enter your master password and the web domain, the tool will generate the same password.
The good thing is that passwords are generated locally on your computer and while all your online accounts will have unique passwords, you will have to remember just one master password. Also, Password Chameleon uses the SHA-1 Algorithm to generate your passwords (aka hashes) and it impossible to decrypt the master password from the generated hashes.
The downside is that this method isn’t a very practical solution for people who could be maintaining multiple accounts on the same website. The web app and browser extensions are free though the mobile apps cost a little less than $2.
Here’s another password trick suggested by Mozilla that recommends picking a base password and then adding a different suffix and prefix based on the website.
Related reading: Keep your Online Accounts Safe and Secure

You can follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook Fan Page for more updates like this and You can also ask a problems related to computers or technology on Ask Tech Inspiration+ and get your solutions faster.

Read More

Download Multiple Web Videos Into a Single Movie or MP3

How to download multiple video files from YouTube, Google Video, Break.com and other web video websites into one single movie or an MP3 file.

While there are tons of tools that let you download web videos with ease, MovAVI offers one unique feature – it can join multiple videos from YouTube, Metacafe, Break.com, etc. into one single file all by itself that you can later download in any format.


Related Reading: How to do Everything with YouTube
Using Movavi is simple – just add the different video URLs (5 is the limit) and select an output format. You can either request the combined video clip as an MP3 audio file (great for music videos) or in regular formats like iPod MP4, AVI, Flash Video & Quicktime.
Movavi will not join your videos instantly – it sends out an email when the video to ready for download. If you are looking for instant conversion, check this Flash Video Guide. MovAVI can also be used to join video files that reside on your local hard drive.
MovAVI.com [Online Video Converter]

You can follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook Fan Page for more updates like this and You can also ask a problems related to computers or technology on Ask Tech Inspiration+ and get your solutions faster.

Read More

A Better Way to Bookmark Web Videos

Meet a useful web app that lets you bookmark web videos from all popular video sharing websites to a common queue and you can watch them all later.

[Updated] As you may have noticed, YouTube offers a handy Watch Later feature that lets you add the current video to a queue with a click. You can then conveniently watch all these ‘queued’ videos later when you have the time.There’s one minor problem though.
YouTube is ‘the’ most popular video sharing website but it’s not the only one around. You may routinely find great videos on Vimeo, TED, Facebook, and other video sharing sites but there’s no way to add these videos to your YouTube’s ‘watch later’ playlist.
Enter RadBox, a useful web app that lets you collect web videos from various video sites to a common queue and you can then watch them later on your desktop or the iPad.
You can save videos to the RadBox queue in two ways. There’s a one-click bookmarklet that will automatically recognize the video embedded on a page and saves it to your queue. Or, if you are on a mobile, you can email the video URL to an email address and it will be added to the “watch later” queue.
The service has been around for some time but the new release provides a better viewing experience and it can now pull videos from your Facebook and Twitter news feeds. RadBox has also launched an iPad app so that puts it in the same league as ShowYou and Boxee.
Radbox supports all popular video websites including YouTube, Vimeo, College Humour, DailyMotion, Blip.tv and many more. It didn’t work with Flickr though.

Read More

Find the Person Behind an Email Address

Know the email address of someone but nothing more? Learn techniques to help you uncover the location and other details of the email sender.
You get an email from a person with whom you have never interacted before and therefore, before you reply to that message, you would like to know something more about him or her. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?
Web search engines are obviously the most popular place for performing reverse email lookups but if the person you’re trying to research doesn’t have a website or has never interacted with his email address on public forums before, Google will probably be of little help.
No worries, here are few tips and online services that may still help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.
#1. Find the sender’s location

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.
Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the location of the email sender.
#2. Reverse email search with Facebook

Facebook has 450 million users worldwide and there’s a high probability that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.
Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the sender into the Facebook search box and you’ll immediately know if a matching profile exists in the network.
If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download his profile picture and then upload it to TinEye – it’s a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.
#3. Check all the other Social Networks

You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.
If the email address of the send is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probably that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.
#4. People Search

Finally, if nothing works, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.
Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers

Read More

Windows Live Photo Gallery vs Picasa

The new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery supports facial recognition, geo-tagging, panorama stiching and themed slideshare but is it better that Google’s Picasa software? Read a detailed comparison.

A new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery, a free program that lets you manage your collection of photos and videos, will be available for download later today on live.com.
The new Photo Gallery remains a solid alternative to Google’s Picasa software but is it good enough for you to switch from Picasa? Read this comparison.

Comparing Photo Gallery with Picasa

People tags are now available in both Picasa and Photo Gallery so you can quickly tag photos with names.

Both programs are equally efficient at detecting and recognizing faces in photographs but there’s one difference – Photo Gallery stores the people tags with the photo itself while tags created in Picasa stay inside the program. The Photo Gallery approach is more useful because if you email or even copy a photo to another computer, the people tags are preserved.
Picasa lets you associate people tags with only pictures while in Photo Gallery, people tags can be applied to images as well as videos.
Geotagging is available in both programs so if your digital camera or mobile phone doesn’t add geographic location to captured photos, you can add it manually. Picasa offers an integrated Google Maps so you can drop the pin at the exact location where the pictures were take while in Photo Gallery, you have to write the street address manually which may not be very accurate in all cases.

Each of these programs will install a photo screensaver in your Windows directory that will run a slideshow of your photos on the screen while your computer is idle.
The Photo Gallery screensaver can also play video clips in the screensaver while Picasa will only do photos. However, Photo Gallery works only with locally stored photos while the Picasa screensaver can also pull fresh images from the web as it supports RSS feeds.
Both programs allow you to create impressive movies of your photos (that you can put on YouTube) – Picasa has this functionality built-in while Photo Gallery will use Movie Maker (also part of Windows Live Essentials) to make videos.

Picasa and Photo Gallery offer an almost common set of tools for editing photographs (auto-tune, crop, red-eye removal, etc.) but two Photo Gallery features that you’ll really miss inside Picasa are Panoramas and Photo Fuse (see screenshot above).
With Panoramas, you can stitch multiple photographs into one long shot. Photo Fuse is even more interesting. Say you have two similar shots but in one image, the eyes of your child are closed while in the other one, his mom is looking somewhere else. You can easily merge these two shots using their best parts and create that perfect image with Photo Fuse. This should also help when you want to remove other people from your vacation photos.
You can create self-running photo slideshows in both programs but Photo Gallery also offers themes so your slideshows can look even more awesome.

Photo Gallery is integrated with Skydrive so you have 25GB of online storage space for your photos while that limit is only 1GB in the case of Picasa Web Albums. Photos and videos can be easily shared on Flickr, Facebook and YouTube in either of the two programs but Photo Gallery will also preserve your people tags inside Facebook albums and SkyDrive. This feature is however not working in the current version.
Finally, Windows Live Photo Gallery will only work on Vista and Windows 7 machines while Picasa is available on XP as well as Linux and Mac.

You can follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook Fan Page for more updates like this and You can also ask a problems related to computers or technology on Ask Tech Inspiration+ and get your solutions faster.

Read More