Picasa is a lesson to the world in usability design. In less than five megabytes, this image organizer succeeds in being a completely rounded package with many editing tools that will satisfy part-timers and enthusiasts alike. However, what really makes Picasa stand out is the beautifully-executed interface, which proves a complete pleasure to use thanks to its speedy pace and some clever animations and fades.

Thanks to an initial image scan, you won’t ever have to go digging through your hard drive for last summer’s holiday snaps, and it will even order every picture you have chronologically, letting you quickly browse to any obscurely-named files in seconds. While Picasa can be used as a viewer, it has not been designed for that and so viewing should be left to another program such as the free FastStone Image Viewer. Where it does excel is in retouching your pictures with colour corrections and a few effects such as blur or film grain. Each edit can be done on the fly with an instant preview of the result and, of course, if something doesn’t quite work out, you can always go back via the undo button.

While these editing utilities cater for the majority of users’ needs, it would have made sense to include the ability to resize images, especially as Picasa includes features that make it easy to publish to the web in the form of a blog. You can also email any single or collection of images through Outlook or directly from Picasa if using your GMail account.

Some of the additional extras give this program a touch of class that you rarely find in Windows software, including the ability to make a collage from a set of images and a handy star rating system that lets you mark your favourite snaps and later single them out giving you the best of the best. Having been acquired by Google, Picasa is now freely available to the masses and is continually improving with each new iteration. With this in mind, it comes highly recommended for photography novices and pros, who have a significant number of images to organize on their PC.