Google Picasa

 Google Picasa

Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time may have resided at Idealab) in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my house", and "pic" for pictures (personalized art). In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa and began offering it as a free download.

Native applications for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X (Intel only) are available through Google Labs. For Linux, Google has bundled Wine with the Windows version to create an installation package rather than write a native Linux version, but this version is severely out of date (the latest Windows version, however, can be run with Wine, see Linux section). There is also an iPhoto plugin or a standalone program for uploading photos available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later.

For my photos, I use Picasa. A free product from Google, I’ve been using Picasa for years and I’m still impressed. Not only does it have some surprisingly robust photo editing tools, but there’s a lot of fun to be found in Picasa features, with their newest tagging and face recognition tools guaranteeing a lot of hours of figuring out who is who and wondering why you have pictures of them.

 

But Picasa also provides you a fair amount of online space to store albums, another backup option. If I were smart I’d just combine Picasa and Flickr and have all my pictures online, but for the moment Picasa is all I need (or have time for).
As for more advanced photo editing, obviously Photoshop is the gold standard but then you might need some gold to buy it. I’m nowhere near that interested, but even though there’s a nice OpenSource alternative in GIMP, it’s pretty geeky and you’d better know what you’re doing 

Dowenlowad