Although I am not a huge fan of Macs, I will readily admit there are many ways in which the Mac is far superior to a PC. I have long been jealous of iPhoto and the lack of a similarly elegant program for the PC.
Last year Google purchased Picasa, the closest thing a PC version of iPhoto and made it available for free. Although I liked a great many features in Picasa, it lacked enough essential tools that I ended up not using it regularly.
Well Google has just released Picasa 2 and the new version is chock full of the features that were missing before. New in version 2 are 12 photographic filter effects, color and lighting adjustments, red-eye removal, photo cropping and straightening; backup capabilities like archiving photos from a computer to a CD or DVD, saving photos on an external drive, and creating gift CDs with personalized slideshows.
I’ll report back after I’ve gotten a chance to put it through it’s paces.