A few months ago, Google bought Picasa Inc, a company that, as far as I know, has so far only released one product: Picasa. I'd describe Picasa as WinAmp for pictures. The first time you run it, it'll scan your entire harddrive for pictures (and movies, apparently), and categorize them into albums based on their "picture taken on" attribute, last modified attribute, and path.The interface is pretty damn amazing, reminiscent of Apple's stuff.

Anyway, Google's Picasa division must have been hard at work, as they've just this morning released Picasa 2.0. The best part: it's free. Business analysts are pretty confused on what Google's strategy is. "The question lurking in the background, as it always does with Google's products, is how it fits into their overall strategy. At first glance, the search angle is obvious. Google is all about search, and Picasa is a tool to search and organize your image library. However, adding the editing tools and other new functionality in version 2.0 required Google to spend some development dough on the effort, and now they are giving the enhanced version away." [source: Ars Technica] Picasa lets you tag your photos using EXIF (a standard that allows you to embed information into picture files without altering the image). The intent is that you would give your favorite photos keywords ("bemani", "hot asian girls", "hentai", etc.) so that you can have Picasa quickly show you all the photos with a certain keyword.

If you're intrigued, and have a large collection of... ahem... unsorted pictures... You might want to check out the "Picasa Tour". I'll probably post a few more comments on it once I've had a change to use it a bit more (it's still scanning my massive "photo" collection), but the first impression was sweet.