A great solution to organizing and sharing your photos

I'm horrible at journaling. It's one of those things I've always wanted to be good at, but can't seem to do consistently. In an effort to save my memories until I have time to jot them down, I take tons of pictures and videos. However, after awhile the hundreds of digital media files can be overwhelming to keep organized. I don't have the time, budget or energy to scrapbook, so I opted for an easier digital solution.

About two years ago I discovered Picasa. It's a clean, efficient, and free program available from Google. Essentially, Picasa searches your hard drive, finds all the image files and organizes them for you by date. Once Picasa adds them to its library, you can label them and organize them into virtual 'albums'. Picasa also offers great tools to edit, print, email, or blog whatever you've got stored.

I love it because it doesn't actually alter any of the original files. If I crop and lighten a picture, I can come back months later and undo any changes with a simple click of a button. They also have a great search tool which allows me to find specific pictures quickly and easily. For example, my daughter's teacher needed a picture of her in her Halloween costume for a class project. I typed in her name and the word 'ladybug' and Picasa showed me only the pictures that had those two words included in the label. I was able to find the exact picture I was looking for in just a few seconds. I hit print, threw it in her backpack and she was good to go.

Earlier this year, I decided I wanted to filter through all my photos this way, so I bought a scanner and scanned all our old prints. Picasa added them automatically and I labeled them as they loaded. Now I've got all our family's pictures in one place and they're completely searchable.

One of the great things about Google programs is that they are always improving them. A new feature they've added in Picasa2 is called Web Albums. Web albums allow you to upload tons of pictures (you get around 1000 for free and can pay to upgrade) into albums that your friends and family can view, print, or download anytime. It's kind of like having a digital scrapbook on your own webpage. It's also a great way to back-up the photos stored on your machine. If for some horrible reason my laptop crashes I know that I can just click over to my web album and download all my photos instantly.

It's no journal and it's certainly not the beautiful finished product that you scrapbookers produce, but it works for me. It's simple, efficient and free. It's tough to beat that. Just thought I'd pass it on.

Here's the link if you're interested: http://picasa.google.com/index.html