Alternatives to Picasa

Casual and amateur photographers who wanted a simple, no-cost way to organize and touch up the photos already piling up on their computer.

Picasa automatically scanned a computer for photos and organized them into a searchable library by folder, date, or face-recognition-based groupings of people. It included basic editing tools for cropping, red-eye removal, color and contrast adjustment, and one-click fixes, plus features for creating collages, slideshows, and captions. Integration with Google's Picasa Web Albums allowed photos to be uploaded and shared online directly from the desktop app.

Users installed the desktop application, which indexed image files on their hard drive into a browsable library; from there they selected photos to edit with the built-in tools, tag with names or captions, and optionally upload to a web album for sharing via a link.