Windows has its fair share of photo management programs, but we've chosen Picasa as the best for its impressive feature set and relative ease of use.
- Easily import photos from your camera, flash drive, or hard drive
- Scan specific folders on your hard drive and automatically add new photos to your library
- Automatically sort photos by date and event
- Facial recognition that allows sorting by person
- Geotag photos and view albums on a global map
- Fix issues like red eye, color, and lighting with a simple, easy-to-use photo editor
- Design and create photo collages, video slideshows, screensavers, and more
- Share photos via email or through Picasa Web Albums
Picasa's main strengths come in the form of organizational power and simplicity in editing. If you want an advanced photo editor, go somewhere else, but Picasa is perfect for the regular home user that just wants to organize their photos and make them look a little better without doing much work (or knowing a whole lot about photo editing). You can organize photos from all over your hard drive, sync them with Picasa's web albums, sort your photos by the people in them, and make all sorts of fancy slideshows to show your friends. You can also perform a few edits on things like lighting and color, most of which are automated by Picasa. You can perform a few manual edits, but not a lot—perfect for those that don't want to be overwhelmed.
Unfortunately, Picasa's biggest strengths are also its biggest weaknesses. Its organizational powers are great, but a little confusing at first. When you start up Picasa, it will search your entire hard drive for images and put them into your library. This is great for the disorganized, but will leave you with a huge amount of image (wallpapers, icons, and whatever else) that you certainly don't want in your photo editor. You can edit this from Picasa's Folder Manager, but it isn't obvious or easy to find, which can cause a lot of stress on new users.
Similarly, it gives you barely any control over editing your photos. For the most part, you either get the photo you took, or you get the photo you took that Picasa corrected for you. You have a few manual sliders available like highlights, shadows, and color temperature, but that's about it. That said, its auto-correct features do a really good job at correcting your photos, so you won't be disappointed unless maybe you're a photography nut.
Picasa also only syncs to Picasa Web Albums, which is annoying. If you want to upload to any other non-Google service, like Facebook or Flickr, you'll need a
plugin or two to do so.
Most basic photo editors are pretty similar to Picasa.
Windows Live Photo Gallery is a popular option that integrates well with Windows, allows uploading to SkyDrive, Facebook, and Flickr, and even has a handy panoramic stitch feature that Picasa is missing. It doesn't, however, have Picasa's video editing features, Picasa Web Albums support, nor is it
quite as pretty or easy to use. Another thing people like about it, though is its ability to actually save changes—like names of people or geotag information—to the metadata of the file, which Picasa does not do (though that may be preferable to some). The free version of
Zoner is a good option if you don't like Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery, and its $45 Home version or $65 Pro version are a nice step up to more intermediate and advanced editing features.
More seasoned photography buffs will want to check out
Adobe Lightroom, which is going to give you many more advanced editing options.
Lastly, as Adam mentioned in his
App Directory entry for the Mac, you can always just keep your photos in a series of folders on your hard drive. You don't have to deal with bloated organization programs with features you don't need, you can organize your photos however you want, and even sync them up to the web with Dropbox. It isn't for everyone, but if photo management apps just tend to get in your way, there's no shame in cultivating a very organized My Pictures folder.
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