Dave's Favorites: Organize Your Photos With Picasa

Walk into a movie theater, and you'll find the plot of almost any Hollywood movie built around the concept of unintended consequences. Unintended consequences abound in real life, too; consider what we deal with in digital photography. Digital cameras give us the freedom to take an unlimited number of photos without paying for film or processing, but the result--the unintended consequence--is that those pictures quickly number into the thousands and become difficult to manage.

Picasa is a free image organizer that can tame your digital clutter. What makes it so great? Without a doubt, it's the program's timeline mode. This displays your images on a sort of chronological carousel that you can spin around using the arrow keys on your keyboard. You see the date and thumbnails of the pictures, and you can double-click anywhere you like to launch a slide show of pictures from that time period.

I'm also totally jazzed by the handy Picture Tray (a holding area at the bottom of the screen) in the program's more traditional album mode. As you locate images in your albums, you can hold them in the tray and later act on them all at once--to print, e-mail, share, and so on.

Picasa has strokes of genius, but it's far from perfect. The timeline mode's thumbnails are so blurry they look like they were rendered using a French Impressionism filter. And to add insult to injury, the timeline mode doesn't connect to the ordinary album mode. You can't locate a set of pictures in the timeline and then add them to the Picture Tray, so they may as well be two separate programs.

Nonetheless, Picasa is still well worth checking out, especially given the price. I have great hopes for the upcoming version 2.0. You can download the current version from the company's Web site.