Picasa

For those of you who haven't noticed, Google recently bought a small company that produced a piece of software for organising your photos, Picasa. Google has made made some improvements and have launched Picasa 2 as a free download.

I've been playing about with it for the last week or so and it's pretty damn good. For those of us not using a Mac, there wasn't really an easy to use piece of software, certainly not a free one, for organising your photos so this should prove useful. Apart from being easy to use and having a lot of useful, fast and painless tools (rotating images, removing red eye, enhancing colours, etc) it seems a well finished and well thought out product. It links in to a number of other services, including Google's own Blogger service for automatic uploads, it'll export to HTML, it links in to a number of online photo printing services, as well as Hello, you can add captions and view EXIF data, it links in with GMail and does lots of other things. Obviously it allows you to search your collection too.

I'd like to see the option to link into international versions of the printing services (my newly created Ofoto account didn't work, I assume because the US and UK services work independently) and I'd love to be able to export to Flickr. Hopefully these will come, assuming it takes off.