For photo editing, I use an old version of Photoshop, V.5., which I like a lot. Having read that Google makes Picasa 2 available free, I decided to try it - available here with overview, features, etc.:

www.picasa.com

It seems strong for finding and organizing photos on the hard disk, also good for slide shows, captions, creating CD's for others, making your own screensavers, etc. But unless I'm missing something, the editing features are pretty weak - overall items like rotating, color adjustment, etc. are there, but I don't see any "selection tools" for working on only a part of the image. So it seems to be a (very affordable!) option vs. the album/slide show programs, but no substitute for Photoshop/Elements, Paint Shop Pro, etc. At least from my first impression. In the PC Mag review, the editors give it 4.5 stars, but the users only 3.5.

:-D

I just tried it and it looks to do the same thing as iphoto, but not as good. Personaly, I like iphoto for family stuff like this, and photo mechanic for "work" stuff.

But it does do some cool things, and is no doubt a good deal.


Brad

for photo organizing, I think if you're on the PC, it's the best out there. I think it outperforms Adobe's Album product personally. It's a bit weak on the photo editing, but it does everything you basically need it to, and it does what it does well.

and for free, you can't get any better. Any Google product is the good stuff.

I too liked Picasa but found that after downloading it my internet connection would disconnect every one or two minutes. After removing Picasa from the drive I had no more problems with the connection. To bad or me as I liked the program.

I know that picassa calls up the internet to check for updates all the time, so maybe if you could turn that feature off somehow, it wouldn't kill your internet connection

I don't think Picasa was ever meant to be a replacement for PhotoShop or any other graphics manipulation program. Picasa has always been in the "basic" tools with photo organizing realm of things.

I think it probably is comparable to PhotoShop Album, Jasc PSP Album, etc.

I've found Picasa2 to be really excellent for organising and quickly searching through photos... Searching through a couple thousand images is so quick and easy. As far as image editing goes... well, it does the job for very basic image manipulation which is fine for just emailing and viewing general photos, but if you really want to do some serious post processing then it is not the tool for the job.
The only complaints I would have with Picasa2 (which seem to be shared by quite a few users judging by the forums on the Picasa site) is that it doesn't have heirachical labels and the support for IPTC keywords is somewhat buggy (it often fails to read IPTC keywords written to photos by other software such as IMatch)
Also... still waiting on the linux version to come out.
Picasa2.x combined with Gimp on a linux box and I'd be as happy as a pig in sh*t.

I have Picasa since version 1.something. And I think it's very useful. I used Adobe Album (?)but it doesn't automaticaly restore your album after formating your harddisk. That is, Picasa stores little picasa.ini files in every folder you added pictures from. After formating your drive (of course not the one with the pictures on it, but the one with windows on it), you just have to reinstall Picasa and it restores the pictures and the tags you added to the pictures.
You can also make backups from your pictures on dvd which is very useful. It also supports printing pictures (multiple pics on 1 sheet).
Downside is that the tagging system is not that good. But I couldn't find an other program that combined everything.

My daughter is into taking a lot of snapshots and Picasa2 is perfect for her. She can organize her pictures, do some minor fixing (lighten, darken, crop), and then print a handfull of pictures using less paper then she was with programs that don't give you the options that Picasa2 does. The proogram is so user friendly that I rarely get the "I need help" calls that I used to get when she was using some of the other entry level programs.

I really like picasa 2 and use it a ton. I dont like the new picasa forum. So maybe one of you can help me out.

Is there any way to put up two or more pictures on the screen at once-for comparasion sake?

For e-mailing w/o using hello or G-mail what is the best way?