With Picasa google's equivalent of 'Adobe Album' you can store all your photographs in a database. Google will soon include Neven Vision, face recognition technology in Picasa soon, this will allow you to automatically label and search all the images in your photo database by the people in it. no more hours looking for pictures of so-and-so by eye


Ever wanted to do more with your digital photographs but refuse to fork out for Adobe Album and Photoshop? Never fear ‘Picasa' and ‘The Gimp' are here! With ‘Picasa' you can automatically store all your photographs in a database so you'll be able to easily find that photograph you took all those years ago..infact google are including some artificial inteligence software (Neven Vision) into Picasa that will really revolutionise the storage. And with ‘The Gimp' you are able to do all your graphical editing.

Full Article Here....


PICASA - For all your digital photograph archiving (Rather than paying for "Adobe Album"):

Picasa organises your entire collection while you watch, scanning the images on your computer and automatically sorting them by date. Move and re-name pictures from inside Picasa.

Organization and Editing:
For organizing photos, Picasa has file importing and tracking features, as well as tags and collections for further sorting. It also offers several basic photo editing functions, including color enhancement, red eye reduction and cropping. Other features include slide shows, printing and image timelines. Images can also be prepared for external use, such as for e-mailing or printing, by reducing file size and setting-up page layouts. There is also integration with online photo printing services.

Backup:
Picasa does not overwrite photos when changes are made. Instead, it lists all the changes made and puts the list in a separate file. Whenever the image is opened in Picasa it will check the list and apply the changes that the list tells it to. If you open the photo in any other program, though, the image will not have the changes applied to it. To see the changes when using the photo in other programs you must 'export' the photo. In Picasa 2, a new feature has been added to allow users to save changes made to the pictures in Picasa by overwriting the actual picture file. However, a backup version of the original picture is made and saved in a hidden folder named "Backup", which is located within the same folder as the original picture.

Image recognition:
On 15 August 2006, Google announced they had acquired Neven Vision whose technology can be used to search for features within photos such as people or buildings. Google has stated that this technology will be applied to searching for photos within Picasa at some stage in the near future. [1]

Neven Vision incorporates several patents [2]specifically centred around face recognition from digital photo and video images. Neven Vision's technology has been voted among the top finishers in both the FERET 1997 and FRVT 2002 independent tests comparing the world's best face recognition technologies [3].



THE GIMP - For all your photoediting (An excellent free open source application):

GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program. Its creators, Spencer Kimball and Petter Mattis, initially started GIMP as a semester-long project for a class at the University of California, Berkeley. Both were integral members of eXperimental Computing Facility, a student club at Berkeley (the GIMP's file extension, XCF, is taken from the initials of this club). In 1997, after both Kimball and Mattis had graduated from Berkeley, the name was changed to GNU Image Manipulation Program when it became an official part of the GNU project.

GIMP can be used to process digital graphics and photographs. Typical uses include creating graphics and logos, resizing and cropping photos, changing colors, combining images using a layer paradigm, removing unwanted image features, and converting between different image formats. GIMP can also be used to create animated images using an improved layers method. The full capabilities of the GIMP extend much further, however, and include advanced image editing, manipulation, and professional graphics creation. It is often used as a free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop, which is the dominant bitmap editor in the printing and graphics industries.

Features:
Brushes, colors, and painting tools
GIMP comes with 48 standard brushes, plus facilities to create new ones. Brushes can be used in hard-edged, soft-edged, or eraser modes, be applied at different opacities, or used to apply various effects. GIMP also has a Palette with RGB, HSV, colour wheel, CMYK, and mixing modes, plus tools to pick colours from the image with various averaging options. Support for hexadecimal colour codes (as used in HTML). While 'CMYK' is offered in the Palette, GIMP, by default, works only in RGB, grayscale and index color modes.

Gradients:
GIMP also supports gradients, which integrate into its other tools (such as brushes and fills) to shade image areas with automated color blending. It includes a variety of built-in gradients, and as with the brushes, also allows the user to customize and create their own gradient fills.

Selection and masking tools:
GIMP can perform rectangular or circular selection, freehand selection, and color selection. Alternatively, the Smart Selection tool, known as the "Magic Wand", can be used to select contiguous regions.

Layers, channels, and transparency:
GIMP has support for layers, including transparent layers, which can be shown, hidden, or made semitransparent. It also supports transparent and semitransparent images. Channels add different types of opacity and color effects to images. Settings made with the opacity slider in the Layers Dialog are not represented correctly in the Transform tool previews. This can make lining up layers correctly more difficult.

Paths:
Paths containing line segments or bezier curves can be made. Paths can be named, saved, and painted with brushes, patterns, or various line styles. They are also a extremely powerful and useful selection tool, allowing you to create complex selections. Intelligent Scissors (iScissors) tool can be used to auto-create paths between regions defined by strong color-changes.

Effects, scripts and filters:
GIMP has approximately 150 standard effects and filters, including Drop Shadow, Blur, Motion blur, Noise, and much more.

Scripting:
GIMP operations can be automated with macro programs. A Scheme interpreter is built-in, or external Perl, Python, or Tcl can be used. Ruby is in experimental development. These scripts and plugins for GIMP can be used interactively, or combined non-interactively. For example, images for a webpage could be generated on the fly using CGI scripts, or a large number of images could have their color corrected and format changed. For simple automatable tasks, a package such as ImageMagick might be quicker, but GIMP has much more powerful features.


Here are some examples of what you can do easily with the gimp:

Create 3D Pictures Tutorial with The Gimp