Picasa: Free Photo Management Suite for Netbook

Picasa is a free photo management suite from Google that can be used to organize and manage all the photos on your netbook. Picasa is small in size – around 9 MB. Once you install Picasa on your netbook, it will scan the hard drive of your netbook to quickly find all the photos. Then it can arrange the photos nicely in albums. When you copy new photos to your netbook, Picasa will automatically index them, and you can access all of them from Picasa.

Apart from photo management features, Picasa has really good and advanced Photo Editing features. In fact, Google markets it as Free Photo editing software, but I believe it is more of a full featured photo management suite. In terms of photo editing, Picasa lets you easily edit your photos. You can crop and resize them, add nice effects, sharpen, blur, and lot more. Basically, it has all the features that you might require for casual editing of your photos. This ensures that you do not need to install a separate image editor like Fotografix to edit your photos.

My favorite feature in Picasa is name tagging. Basically, you can add name tags to your photos, which basically means you tell what is the name of person in the photo. Then, Picasa can identify the same person in other photos, and can name tag them. This might not be accurate in the beginning, but the face recognition quality keeps improving as you tag more photos. Absolutely love this feature.

Here is a small video that explains how to do face tagging in Picasa:

Another great feature of Picasa is that it is integrated with Picasa Web Albums. So, you can directly store your photos online by just one click. The only problem I find with Picasa web albums is that if offers only 1 GB of free space. Instead of that, I prefer to store my photos in services like GoAruna which offers free unlimited free online storage space.

Picasa is a really good choice for your netbook if you think you will have lots of photos on that. It is small in size, full featured, and completely free.