Playing with Pictures

My favorite  aspect of Picasa is the ease of use. In this bit of time that I have spent with Picasa, I really am starting to enjoy it. I have taken some classes that focused more on Photoshop, but Picasa seems easier to learn and use. I was able to pick things up and use it fairly easily even before watching any of the tutorials. I enjoy playing with the picture filters including the light and texture changes. This could even be a program I give to students to design artful approaches to lessons we discuss in class. I could spend part of a class period explaining the essential aspects and then let them "play" for a while (like I did) until they feel comfortable and then design simple projects to help them utilize what they learned.
Besides the simplicity, the feature of Picasa that I find most useful and interesting is the  organizational capability. In addition to the traditional library look that puts pictures in categories by how they were uploaded, I like that when I import pictures from my computer's photo library it immediately starts tracking faces in the pictures so that I can tag people and find all of the pictures I want. For personal use, it will be nice to track the pictures of my daughter's development. All of the pictures of her will be together so I can watch her change over time. Similarly, I can track class pictures so that I can look over the years of classes but also the progression of students from event to event and project to project within a year.