Google recently bought Picasa (something of an iPhoto clone) and their software is now available for free download. I decided to give it a try. It had no trouble digesting my 45GB of photos (gulp!) and is remarkably fast. It's PC-only right now, and the interface is clearly based on iPhoto, but unlike iPhoto it comfortably handles my huge collection on a 2.4GHz P4. iPhoto, on my dual-processor 1GHz G4, choked badly on many fewer images. It's all about the quality of the code.

Picasa is a great way to browse a huge collection of photos. It's somewhat useful for sorting, and not terribly useful for photo enhancement. Picasa is polite enough to leave your files where it found them, and can scan those folders for new images if they ever show up. And, it's completely multithreaded, so it will do all of that in the background. In essence, it's iPhoto done right, although iPhoto does have slightly more advanced photo enhancement support. For most consumers, it's exactly what they need, and even for people like me with more complicated workflows, raw image conversion, and all that, it's still useful.

So, check it out.

Have any page for specs on the product? I want to install a nice image manager and over the years of casual browsing for such a tool, the best I have ever read specs on is iMatch.

Does Picasa support variable numbers of EXIF tags? Does it support IPTC meta data?

IMatch supports both and also analyses your phootographs for colour similarities and other stats. Maybe overkill, but meta data is a must. I don't want to deal with a proprietary system of tagging information only to find out later none of the data I've created is portable.

Bruno

Sounds good I'll definitely check it out

Wow, thanks. That's a great program. I've been trying to figure out a way to show off a culled collection of my nearly 1500 pictures of my trip to Europe, and any programs I had were too slow. This is wonderful.

I'll just tell people now that there's a default setting for slideshows that displays the images at a lower resolution. Just uncheck that and you're set. (Tools>Options>Slideshow)

Picasa will show you EXIF metadata, and will sort images based on the date field in the EXIF header, but it doesn't appear to have any way of editing EXIF. Instead, as far as I can tell, everything just goes into its own database.

To me, Picasa is a handy tool for glancing at a large volume of pictures, just another tool in the toolbox. I certainly wouldn't use it if I was a newspaper trying to track the output of a staff of photographers...

I've been most pleased with ACDsee 6.0.
It supports tons file types including video and lots of useful tools including being able to edit EXIF info.

Does anyone know how to get Picasa to play videos that are brought up during a slideshow? I understand it's most likely due to the time limit for each item in a slideshow, but I'd like them to play.

I'm a ACDSee fan, as well.

*edit*
Sorry, I was having a very frustrating time, but figured it out. It is still kind of a frustrating program in many ways, though.

As it turns out, the guy who wrote Picasa turns out to be an old roommate of mine (it's a small, small world). If people here have feedback on what they'd like to see in Picasa, I can make sure it gets to the right place.

I'll take you up on that This is a great program for my digital frame which I built (pics to come, haven't had much time yet).. However I haven't found a way to start the program up in slideshow mode automatically starting the slideshow , it would be almost perfect if It could do that!!
Aafew more slideshow options wouldn't hurt, if you could define which album starts up first during auto slideshow, the ability for slideshow to show multiple albums..

cheers
Jaidev

I actually used to swear by ACDSee, but gave up it a while back and use the wonderful Irfanview for most stuff now.

(obviously I didn't just used to shout "ACDSEE!")