Google’s Picasa is a simple yet powerful way to store your photos. Once installed, it will scan your drive for images and present the chronologically by folders. You can then add your own tags to any image, and create albums of images, photos can even exist in more than one album.

Once you’ve got things tagged and organized, the search function lets you quickly find any images within Picasa. There’s some simple editing and tuning tools, one of which is “I’m feeling lucky.” From a technical standpoint it’s a level adjustment algorithm, but like a Google search by the same name, it almost always makes the photo look better.

It’s integrated with Picasa Web Albums, so you can publish your photos online. Picasa is also integrated with various on-line photo finishers, so you can upload to them directly from the program. Finally, it has tools for creating web pages from a selection of photos, based on a customizable template.