PICASA for photos

PICASA is just a viewer/organizer with some manipulation capabilities. Mostly what it does is index and keep track of graphics on your machine, whatever folder they may be in, let you move them around among folders on your machine, do some basic tag editing, create simple presentations, post graphics and/or presentations to the web or eMail, and do some simple enhancements/corrections. It doesn't replace "My Pictures", its an overlay which adds a bit of graphics functionality which may or may not be of interest/use to you. It can be configured to "put" downloaded graphics - from camera, scanner, web, or removeable media - wherever you please on your machine. It can be turned on and off at will. When running, its indexing service, PICASA Media Detector, does use a modest amount of your machine's resources, but on modern machines the impact should be negligable. If you have lotsa graphics, especially if they're scattered around some and/or there are lotsa duplicates, the initial indexing can take a while, but its a background process, calling for no attention from you.

I've found it handy for tracking down particular images, for grouping similar images into "virtual folders", and for comparing and getting rid of unnecessarilly duplicated images ... a sort of "housekeeping" tool.

I like Picasa because I never really learned to use Photoshop Elements. I find that Picasa's "tweaks" are usually sufficient for my needs. In rare cases, when I need something more, I send it to my brother, who is a whiz on the full Photoshop.