Picasa

Over the last few years, more people have begun the migration away from the classic film based camera to a digital camera. Personally, I can't imagine ever going back to a film based camera. I like to take tons of pictures, go back through and get rid of the ones that didn't come out very well, and keep the ones that did. Doing this with film becomes expensive, and probably isn't very friendly for the environment.

As a result, I have (at present) 9.7G of photos on my hard drive. I know this will expand as time goes on, and I intend to move all of our actual photos into digital form. The problem is dealing with all of these files.

The best program I have found for managing photos is Picasa. Picasa is a free (let me say that again - free) program that was written by a small company that was eventually bought out by Google.

Besides just the price point, Picasa does several things right. It's very intutive to use, allowing you to easily manage and edit your photos. In the past I have always created a new folder for set of pictures. Picasa lends itself very well for this organization, listing all folders by the date they were taken in - which is exactly what I want. (The biggest reason I don't use the Microsoft alternative is because it doesn't list my photos that way).

Picasa provides you with the ability to do simple editing, like cropping and red-eye reduction. It also allows you to easily add keywords (for easy searching) and captions (so you know what that ship was you took a photo of.)

My favorite feature by far, though, is the easy ability to upload photos. Google will give you a small amount of storage (a much larger amount is available for a nominal fee). It's easy to upload and share (or not share) pictures. Other Picasa users are also able to go to the site and download your albums, which is nice in situations where multiple people took pictures of an event and you wish to collect them all. What's also nice is it's an easy way to back up your photos, so should disaster occur (hard drive failure, fire, etc) your photos will be safe.

With the price point and features, if you don't already have something to manage your pictures, this is it.