I’m a huge advocate of Picasa, Google’s photo application that does more than just catalog all the images on your system, but it’ll do everything from create custom slide shows and presentations to create a searchable index of all of your images, and if you’re like me at all, you have hundreds and hundres of images on your system.
Picasa has always been fast, attractive, and best of all, free-and it beats the pants off of some of the more traditional applications like Vallen JPegger or ACD-See (in my opinion). Installation is simple, the application automatically scans your system (the whole system or just selected locations) for images, organizes them into albums, allows you to perform simple manipulations like removing red-eye or changing the orientation of the images, zoom or change the image size, and simple editing. Create a few slideshows or some galleries to be posted on the web, or just scroll through the albums and pick and choose photos to be added to a special collection, it’s all right at the click of a mouse, and not many clicks at that.
Now all of those features were in the original Picasa, and they’re still around in Picasa 2, and PC World gives us a first look review of the new version of the software. Check out the review, and download and try it-if you take as lot of digital pictures like me, or just download a lot of…::ahem:: images, or maybe even do some web development and want places to keep all those images you’ll need for your new sites, Picasa will help simplify the process.
[ http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119921,tk,dn030805X,00.asp ]