picasa is cool

Kathy at Keystone 

This photo is Kathy skiing last week at Keystone. Kathy is cool.

Picasa is a *free* program from Google, it is also cool -- although not as cool as Kathy. It can maintain lists of all the images on your computer, then do all sorts of amazing things with them. The photo editing and retouching tools are great, and it even lets you generate web pages from folders on your machine. Most impressive, it can create XML files with all the handy metadata from the files in any folder under its control -- can anyone say "Flash photo album."

I can send photos straight to Blogger via another free program that integrates seamlessly with Picasa -- "Hello." That is what I did with Kathy's photo, and why you see the little flower-icon thing right under her photo.

I actually used Hello early on, and gave Picasa a try, but Picasa was only a trial at that point, and wasn't as slick as it is now.