Picasa, the digital photo manager from Google has just released its second version ! (Ever noticed how all Google "tools" have this rainbow color scheme, the main Google text ofcourse, the Google desktop icon and the above one). Get it here.

I had a look at it last night for a short time and found in addition to the cool features that the original version had (automatic chronological ordering of all the digital photos, superbly intuitive interface, ability to create cool slideshows), there were a couple of things which looked instantly useful.

For those of us who are not really power tweakers (read Adobe Photoshop and Gimp gurus), it gives twelve basic filters to manipulate your digital photos. God send for the artistically challenged like me. Second, the photographs can be emailed through your gmail account right from the application itself. So you can go ahead and select the photograph(s) you want to send and it opens a nice little browser window right there with your photographs attached, along with your normal gmail auto-complete et-al. Nice! No more trying to remember those pesky digital camera auto-generated names when attaching photographs to send in emails.

They are some other small trinkets of efficiency put in too, they now have a link to Hello! right from Picasa itself, so that you can post pictures to your blog right from it. Hello! also now has a IM for photos, so you can exchange photos with friends with an IM like interface. Haven't tried that though !

Its pretty cool, I was thinking though that the reason that Picasa will/is getting a lot of press and users is because its a Google company and also because its free ! (That again, is as a consequence of it being bought by Google). I am sure there are many such tools which are better but cant be free and don't have the Google aura with them. Ah well! Quite an obvious muse that one :)

On the subject of tools, Yahoo has come out with its desktop search too. I think its based on X1 and supports an amazing number of file formats. Why would you want the Google desktop search now ?

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