A down-side with the surge in digital photography is the pain of keeping track of all the photos. Google thinks that they have the answer to your prayers with Picasa 2. Picasa 2 creates an index of all your picture files on your computer and then categorizes them by year. After that you simply create an album and move the picture files that you want into that album.

The interface is pretty simple and a bit similar to Gmail. It’s possible to mark your photos with a star and describe them. Picasa 2 also has a number of features that enhances and alters your photos, such as red-eye reduction and cropping.  However if you are not familiar with Google from other software or services Picasa’s interface may prove difficult to use.

The real power with Picasa 2 is the different exporting and importing options. It’s easy to import photos from any digital camera. I just plugged in my Canon Powershot SD600 and Picasa found the camera directly.  Picasa 2 makes it easier to browse and select the photos that you want, compared to doing it directly in Windows.

A new feature in Picasa 2 is the web-album, which gives you the ability to upload pictures to online albums for other people to view. Albums can be password protected or public, you get 1GB storage for free. 10 GB of storage costs $20 / year and 40 GB $75 / year.  Smugmug costs $39.95 a year for an unlimited amount of photos. So basically Googles storage offer does not impress.  Other exporting options in Picasa 2 include sending the pictures to a blog in Blogger and burning pictures on a CD or DVD (which works great).

Overall Picasa 2 is a very good piece of software considering it’s free, basically it has it all.  However the paid online album and storage is not as appealing as competing services.