Picassa
A friend of mine was raving about the new Picassa 2. I was a little reluctant at first, but after downloading and installing Picassa, I must say that I am rather impressed with it.
As I have come to expect from Google, the user interface is clean and the feature set is powerful without being overwhelming. The icons are easily interpreted and I had to endure almost no learning curve. Right out of the box (well, I actually downloaded it) Picassa began to find and organize all of my images. The initial organization was by date, by I assume that they can be organized by most any criteria.
The most impressive feature for me was native support of the RAW file format. RAW is literally the raw camera sensor data with no compression or processing of the image prior to saving it. I take and save all of my images from my Canon D60 in the RAW format. Up until Adobe’s Photoshop CS, I had to convert the files into a JPEG or TIFF and then browse or process them in Photoshop. While Photoshop did a good job of allowing me to view my RAW images, it pales in comparison to the ease of use I get with Picassa. Of course, I will still do all of my editing with Photoshop, but Picassa definitely has it’s place.
