Picasa lovers out there have an endless source of simple tools for enjoying our pictures. I’ve been using Picasa for 10+ years now, and this ‘kaleidoscope’ effect never occurred to me. My friend, Vicki Wassenhove, from the Quad Cities Computer Society and their Digital Photography group had an assignment to use a given picture and improve it in a way that would prompt the question: How Did I Do It?
When I saw Vicki’s wonderful collage, I had to give it a try! With this original picture, Vicki created several works of art!
She started with a simple picture of a flower, cropped it and made 4 copies. Then she flipped the copies, one had to be flipped horizontally, one vertically, and the third needed to be flipped both horizontally and vertically. Picasa’s command to flip horizontally is Ctrl-Shift-H (Cmd-Shift- on Mac) and Ctrl-Shift-V to flip Vertically. She put all 4 pictures into a square Collage, and voila!
Original![]() |
Flip Horizontal![]() |
Flip Vertical![]() |
Flip Horizontal & Vertical![]() |
And my picture, displayed at the top of this article, started with this original:
For more information about flipping pictures, see this past article: Flipping Photos.
Geeks on Tour members may want to watch these tutorial videos. If you’re not a member, you can Join Now!
- For cropping in a perfect square: pics14a.Crop Size Options
- For making multiple copies of picture: pics14d.Ways to Save #140
- For making collages (8 videos): pics73.Picasa Short Course: Collages and Banners
- For adding a frame/border: pics24d.More Effects 31-36
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