I’m literally gobsmacked. I just grabbed Picasa, and it’s without a doubt simultaneously the most lightweight and functional photo organiser I’ve ever used. I’ve played with Adobe Elements and Adobe Photoshop Album before, but both had the same problems most album-type software do - they’re too heavyweight, and they lock you into their method of organisation. All well and good, but I’ve changed platforms too many times and lost too much information each time to warrant the time investment in learning their system and typing everything in.
For a 3 meg download, it’s amazing what it’ll do. You can scroll through your entire list of photos in thumbnail format using a quite ingenious directional scroll-bar (you need to see it to understand) while seeing them all in thumbnail mode, or view them full-screen in timeline or album slideshow mode. And, it recognises when you’ve inserted flash media or connected your camera and automatically downloads everything for you.
You can also input photo metadata (think captions or tags) using the ITPC standard. In English, expect everything else to support it within 6 months, so your captions move with your photos. It supports single click contract / brightness adjustments (which work surprisingly well), as well as EXIF manipulation for the hardcore. I kid you not - it took me half an hour to reorient all my portrait photos for the last two years so they’re oriented correctly. It was so fast, I was actually starting feel ill because of the speed the screen was changing.
It burns, it backs up over a network, and it monitors folders for new photos. What’s not to like?
All it needs now is an automatic web export option (you can export, you just need to play with the settings) and it’d be close to perfect. Google is getting so good it’s downright frightening.