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You know how computer interfaces in the movies always have that high-tech-but-simple look that makes even the most complicated tasks look so easy? If only computer use in real life could be so simple. Most of us find ourselves searching through help files to do rather simple tasks within a complicated interface. Luckily for us, Picasa 2 has taken image organization and editing to such a high level of appearance and ease of use that, when working with your digital photos, you might just think you’re in the movies.

While I named the first version of Picasa "…one of the top ten best free pieces of software on the internet" last year, it wasn’t perfect. Namely, its photo editing tools were lacking, there was no way to backup your precious pictures, and the keyword tagging and search were rather limited. The new version improves these features and adds more including labels (virtual folders), better zooming, batch edits, collages, and more. Yet, since Google owns Picasa, it is still 100% free!

You can read my review of the first free version Picasa to get an idea of its features and how the program is setup. In this review of Picasa 2, I just want to highlight the new features that make it a true contender with the image management programs that you have to pay for.

Photo Editing

A good chunk of the new features in Picasa 2 are found in the photo editing area of the program. The original Picasa had very minimal photo editing tools, but the newest Picasa gives you considerably more power (although it will never rival a standalone photo editing program like Photoshop Elements).

The editing features are divided up onto three tabs labeled Basic Fixes, Tuning, and Effects. Basic Fixes of course contains your typical crop, auto color, and auto contrast adjustments. It also includes a straightening tool that gives you a grid and allows you to rotate your photo, a red-eye removal tool that works wonders, an I’m Feeling Lucky button (just like Google’s) for a quick auto fix, and a sliding fill light tool to brighten your photos.

The Tuning tab contains four sliding adjustments: fill light (don’t ask me why there are two of these), highlights, shadows, and color temperature. It also has a neutral color picker that allows you to choose a spot in the picture that is closest to white so that it automatically corrects white balance. The nice thing about all of these edits is that they never affect your original photo, and you can easily undo all the edits. So feel free to play around or experiment.

The Effects tab gives you options to make your photo black and white, sepia, or a host of other effects. A couple really neat things on this tab include Soft Focus and Focal B&W. With Soft Focus, you can make a photo blurry while choosing an area to keep in focus. You can adjust the amount of blur and the size of the area to keep in focus. Focal B&W makes your photo black and white, but keep an area you choose to stay in color.

The greatest thing about editing in Picasa is that it keeps a complete history of all edits you’ve made to a photo. That means you can make multiple changes to a photo, come back to it years later, and completely undo everything you did. Plus, your original photo is never touched. If you want to permanently apply your edits to a photo (and have it look that way outside of Picasa), you have to specifically tell Picasa to export it. This is a good thing, since you’ll never accidentally overwrite your original.

Another bonus is that you can copy all the edits you made to one photo and apply them to another. Just select the photo you edited, choose Edit > Copy All Effects, select another photo and choose Edit > Paste All Effects.

Photo Organizing Tools

The true purpose of a program like Picasa is to help you organize and search the thousands of digital photos on your hard drive. Picasa excels at this. Picasa by default keeps the folder structure you have on your computer, so you might want to make sure your folders have descriptive names. Once your photos are in Picasa, you can change the folder names and place the folders in collections (groups of folders).

You also have many ways to tag your photos so that they are easily searched. Picasa 2 has added Labels. The name labels is kind of deceiving. Labels are more like virtual folders. You know how some photos just fit into more than one category? For example, you might have a picture of your mother from this past Christmas that’s in your Christmas2004 folder, but you also want to keep pictures of your family members in a “Family” folder. You could just make a copy of it, but if you do this with thousands of photos, they can fill up your hard drive quickly, and if you make any edits to the picture, it’s only done in one place. With Picasa, you can keep that picture of your mother in its original folder and just apply the label “Family” to it. Picasa shows all your labels as a collection of virtual folders right above your “real” folders. If you edit the original picture in any way, it also changes in your labels.

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