Picasa is a graphic software that aids you in editing the pictures stored on your computer. Picasa is a very helpful in finding all the pictures on your hard drives, which can be then organized in albums.

Picasa was originally developed by Picasa Inc, but Google bought the rights for this product when it reached the 1.618 version and improved this free software. Now the version 3 has been released.

The first time you run Picasa, it will scan your hard drive and find all the pictures you have stored. It will automatically sort them into albums by date and label the albums by folder titles. Of course, you can then make your own albums if you are not satisfied with this auto sorting.

Picasa is a very flexible product: you can import pictures from other sharing software or digital cameras and it supports all the widely used image formats (JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD and others). Google has maintained the same simple feel you get when using Picasa. You don’t have fancy filters and tools, but that is not what Picasa is for. You can crop, remove red-eye effects, create slide-shows and apply basic filters and image effects. A nice thing is that Picasa displays a timeline so you can see how the image has “evolved” and you can return to any point you want if you are not satisfied. These changes are made almost instantly since Picasa uses a lot of your computer’s memory to perform each task. Another exciting feature is the AutoFix option that applies a set of filters to your image with generally good results.

Like any other application developed by Google, it is highly compatible with any other Google service. You can upload pictures to your Blogger.com account, apply a geo-tag in Google Earth, send an image by e-mail or even create a backup of your collection on a CD or DVD using the included disk writer.

Picasa is not designed for professionals and it does not pretend that either. It is for home users that want to sort their images and maybe apply some simple effects and filters. And that can be done fast and easy using its intuitive interface.