Google recently bought Picasa (something of an iPhoto clone) and their software is now available for free download. I decided to give it a try. It had no trouble digesting my 45GB of photos (gulp!) and is remarkably fast. It's PC-only right now, and the interface is clearly based on iPhoto, but unlike iPhoto it comfortably handles my huge collection on a 2.4GHz P4. iPhoto, on my dual-processor 1GHz G4, choked badly on many fewer images. It's all about the quality of the code.

Picasa is a great way to browse a huge collection of photos. It's somewhat useful for sorting, and not terribly useful for photo enhancement. Picasa is polite enough to leave your files where it found them, and can scan those folders for new images if they ever show up. And, it's completely multithreaded, so it will do all of that in the background. In essence, it's iPhoto done right, although iPhoto does have slightly more advanced photo enhancement support. For most consumers, it's exactly what they need, and even for people like me with more complicated workflows, raw image conversion, and all that, it's still useful.

So, check it out.