Picasa 3.9.135.80

I think you hit a bulslyee there fellas!

This is a wonderfull free image viewer, while it may not be Photoshop Light Room, it does do a great job of keeping you organized. As soon as it is installed you get the option to have it scan your entire computer (all connected drives), and organize all of the images based on the date that we were taken. It has some nice effects, nothing you can't do in Photoshop, but sometimes you don't need the "big-guns".

It really is a pleasure for me to use because not only does it keep me organized, but it also reads Canon raw files, so there is no need to fill up my computers hard drives with their ineffective, and slow software. The Raw download on Picasa is much faster than on the Canon supplied software. I am not positive, but I think it also supports Nikon's raw format, so it could really be appealing to Nikon shooters as well as a RAW downloader.

The one weakness of this program though is its slide show feature. The buttons in an odd-ball place, and it isn't as nice looking as other image viewers.

Picasa is a photo editing software. Compared to for example Adobe Photoshop the first thing you notice it that it is free, you don’t have to pay a dime. The other main advantage for me is that it is really easy to use. You can easily get rid of blemishes and red eyes, without knowing much about photo editing. There are three different things you can do, basic fixes that remove red-eyes, crops etc. There are also 12 different effects to choose from, to change it to for example black and white. These are also easy to use, and give quite good results. Then there is the most advanced editing options, these are to fix contrast and remove color cast to get a more natural color. They work well and aren’t more difficult to use than the basic fixes. You can also add text, and one feature I think is very funny (although not very useful) is that you can tag the pictures and then see them on Google Earth to see where they are. I miss some more advanced option, it is a very basic editing
package, but for free it is great.
The help tutorial online could have been better, but as long as I’m online I’ve never been stuck as there’s an online user forum. If that doesn’t answer you questions, you should find everything you need by a google search.