Picasa 

How did I miss the boat on this one?

It's probably because I don't take as many digital pictures as I used to, now that my digital camera is about 5 years old. At some point I'll shell out the bucks for a new one, but in the interim, I've just been using the camera in my cell phone to take crappy, random pics.

Back in the day, I used Firehand Ember to manage my pictures. It did thumbnails and made it easy to browse around. When I built a new computer, I didn't bother to get any image management software. I just drilled through the directories by hand, or used Flickr to manage my photos.

I'd heard about Picasa a bunch. About how great it was, about how it's the best photo management tool, and how it's free. Google bought it, rev'd it, and gave it away. I just never jumped on board.

So I'm listening to The Chris Pirillo Show podcast over the weekend. He's talking about his digital camera. Someone asks what software he uses to manage his pictures and he starts to talk about Picasa. Since I was actually at my computer, and not listening in the car or at work like I normally am, I downloaded Picasa with the intention of messing around with it.

Last night, I install it. The interface is pretty clean and looks really nice. But then the magic happens. After it grabs all of my images, I'm able to scroll through thumbnails of thousands of images in just seconds. There's no lag. The rendering is nearly instanteous. The email integration is insanely cool, especially if you use GMail.

Honestly, it's such a simple application that I should be geeking out over it so much. But it's awesome. It does what it is supposed to do, and it does it extremely well, with a really good interface and really good performance. There is so little software these days that does that.

I'm hoping to mess around with some of the labeling features and explore the rest of the application to see what other features are waiting for me to discover.

Anyway, it's rare that a software application comes along and gets you to want to do something more often. Picasa's made me think about throwing some new batteries in the old DC240 and taking some new pictures.