I finally got around to downloading Picasa 2, Google's free image organization tool, a few days ago. I'm glad did. It's fast, fun, and free. It sports a modern interface that new users can easily navigate in minutes.
We have a new digital camera in our house and we had been using Adobe's Photoshop Album 2 to organize our growing collection of images. But to tell you the truth with only a few exceptions, I do not see the need for PS Album anymore.
Picasa automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can easily modify the contents of folders by dragging and dropping images.
The images editing functions are basic but very easy to apply. And we really like the way the program works when editing. Picasa never saves over your original files, so you cannot ruin or damage a picture by editing it. Picasa preserves the original photo as a digital negative, so every edit is fully undoable. If you want to work with your edited pictures in other programs, you have to export or save a copy of them.
The slideshows produced by Picasa look great and you can tell the program to use a folder of MP3's as background music as it plays. I only wish there was a way to send the slide shows via email as PS Album does with it's PDF. Maybe Google will add that in the next version.
