Google Picasa

Picasa is a free photo editing application from Google, running natively on the platforms Windows (XP, Vista, 7) and MacOS X. For Linux, Google bundles the Windows version of Picasa with Wine.

Picasa offers basic photo editing such as red eye reduction, cropping, manipulation of color and sharpness, creating collages, etc.

It also features meta-data editing for time stamps, keyword tagging, and geo-tagging, and can show pictures on a timeline or show their location in Google Earth.

Local folders can be easily uploaded and kept synchronized with Picasa Web Albums (PWA). Other plugins for easy photo uploading exist for Picasa, e.g. Facebook and Flickr. Its picture search engine makes it easy to locate photos based on folders, file names, and captions. Picasa also integrates a photo library backup module which saves Picasa's collected library data and which makes it possible to easily migrate this data to another machine.

As of October 2009, the latest Picasa version is 3.5, which comes with face recognition and clustering creating a locally stored "People" database which synchronizes with PWA (existing people tags can be downloaded from the user's PWA account).