Picasa

Description

Picasa is the best free piece of photo managing and editing software you can find. What does it do? The better question to ask is what it doesn't. At its most basic, it's a photo manager and viewer. Fire up Picasa, and you can browse through all of your photos, organized by folder, as well as by the year they were stored on your hard disk.

When you first install the software, it scans your hard disk for photos. It displays the photos as it finds them so that you can immediately begin working on your photos even while Picasa adds new one. And it also includes a face-tagging feature for your photos.

Picasa is the best free piece of photo managing and editing software you can find.

But all that is just a start. It also has a full complement of editing tools, and lets you create CDs full of photos, as well as photo collages, screensavers, and posters. It will upload your files to Google's Web albums photo site, publish your photos to your Blogger blog, and plenty more as well.

That's not to say that Picasa is perfect. There are countless features, and they're not all organized particularly well, so it can be confusing to use. But once you get the hang of it, you'll be amazed at its power.