Picasa rules the roost for free photo organizers and editors. Some people might not agree, but they’re wrong.

When you first install Picasa on your computer, you can tell it to scan your “My Documents” folder and it will quickly scan all your pictures and organize them (based on their EXIF information) by date.

If you’ve named your folders or files at all, you can use the search functionality to find whatever image folder or file you need, quickly and easily.

You can edit pictures. Cut, crop, straighten, sharpen, add some fill light, add some blur to the edges, color some parts while leaving other parts black and white . . . after downloading, check out the different options for editing. Theres’ a lot to play with.

The best part of all this (well, a good part) is that none of the organization or edits are permanent. Picasa adds a file to your image folders called picasa.ini. It stores the edits and changes made but no changes or edits are actually made to your original picture files. Your OWN method of filing doesn’t change. You can still access all your image files via Explorer. They’ll be whever you put them, and they’ll be unchanged. Your original images don’t ever change, regardless of how many edits you perform in Picasa. Everything you do is un-doable. But if you do want a permanent image from Picasa, simply export it to a location on your hard drive and voila! it will be there, permanently, with all the edits you’ve applied.

Picasa also integrates very nicely with most email clients. Simply press a button and it will automatically resize and attach the picture for you in one easy step.

It does a whole lot more than I’ve said here . . . but I’ll leave all those extra little goodies for you to find yourself.

Now, really, the best part of all this is that Picasa is free. It’s a very high quality program that’s really worth paying for. But you don’t have to. Once you get it, you’ll wonder how you got along without it.

Download Picasa here.