Google offers a free tool called Picasa2 for organizing, modifying, and presenting digital photographs. The tool organizes all the images on your disk (this may take some time if you have thousands of images). I take many pictures of interesting designs, usable and unusable products, and odd instructional signs, but am often in a rush and don't organize my photos for easy access when I am getting ready to do a presentation or put together notes for a class. I installed Picasa2 yesterday after reading a review in the Wall Street Journal (Technology Section, January 18, 2005). The features for "fixing" problems with digital photos seem to work as well as higher end photo and graphics products and there is a cool feature called "collage" that allows you to select a set of photos and create several types of collages. When I started to work with the Picasa, there were times when I had to search for a way to exit from a particular mode. The various "Back" buttons were in different places and sometimes there was no clear exit.
Some interesting features in Picasa are:
1. Batch edit where you can modify a bunch of selected pictures. For Example, if you have a bunch of pictures that are all too dark, you can modify them simultaneously.
2. Timeline which allows you to view all or some of your pictures in sequential order.
3. Movie which allows you to create an AVI file of selected pictures
4. Easy captioning and keywording of pictures and the ability to search on captions
5. The ability to search on: Filenames, captions, keywords, picture color, camera maker and settings, and dates.
I've run into a few bugs that require restarting the product and there are lags during some operations, even on a fast PC.
The product is free and quite useful for anyone with large numbers of digital photos. You can download the product from Google at:
http://www.google.com/downloads/
