Google Picasa 2.5

Since 2004, when Google bought Picasa and began giving it away for free, the software has gained a good name for itself, along with a growing user base.

It isn't just the price (or lack of it) that makes Picasa attractive. From the moment it loads with its subtly animated splash screen, it stands out as modern, polished and responsive.

In terms of image management, Picasa takes a surprisingly old-fashioned approach based on physical folder structure. Admittedly, it's sometimes useful to think of images in terms of where they're stored but, for most users, folders are arbitrary groupings based purely on when you download images from your camera, especially as Picasa's basic Downloader doesn't automatically divide images into groups based on the time between shots.

However, as Picasa sorts folders by creation date rather than name, and shows them following on from each other in the main thumbnail view, this doesn't prove a serious hurdle.

A more serious downside appears when you try to narrow down the view to find particular photos. Picasa's namebased search is excellent but, as photo and folder filenames are rarely meaningful, it's more important to be able to narrow your search based on when the photos were taken, and this proves disappointing. In particular, the Timeline command uses folders rather than photos, and presents these on a scrollable pseudo-3D curve over random background images - flashy, but virtually useless. More useful is the new ability to tag and find your images based on location, using Google Earth, no less.

It isn't all about show - Picasa can also do the basics particularly well. To manually take control of your collection, you can temporarily group and hold images simply by dragging them to the photo tray at the bottom of the screen. From here, you can permanently store the groups as albums (previously called labels) that can then be treated just like physical folders. This process isn't as powerful as Elements' hierarchical tagging, but it's intuitive and effective.

When it comes to editing, the emphasis is on simplicity. Doubleclicking opens the image into an editing workspace, with a tabbed control panel to the left. The first tab offers basic fixes: removing colour casts, optimising exposure, and tools for straightening, cropping and removing red-eye. The second tuning tab offers control over fill light, highlights, shadows and temperature.

The third tab offers 12 effects ranging from basic sharpening to applying a soft focus. With no selection capabilities, retouching tools, layer-based compositing or text handling, Picasa's editing capabilities are limited, but for simple image enhancement they often prove sufficient. And Picasa has one powerful editing trick up its sleeve: all its enhancements are applied nondestructively, so your original image is left untouched. The downside is that your changes are only apparent within Picasa itself. However, since version 2, you can now choose to save all changes directly to their files, in which case Picasa automatically stores a copy of the original image in a hidden directory.

When it comes to photo sharing, print-based control is limited to a few templates and collage layouts, but electronic sharing is excellent. You can burn images directly to CD or DVD for backup or distribution (if the latter, you can optionally include a self-running slideshow and a copy of Picasa). To send selected images directly, you can choose to use your own email program or a Gmail or Picasa Mail account. Alternatively, download Google's Hello IM/file-sharing software, and you can send your images to other Hello users.