With an unusually attractive interface for a PC program - Mac users will recognize OSX as the inspiration for a lot of its visual style - Picasa is a very easy program to get started with. Fire it up for the first time, and it will help you seek out photos on your hard drive(s), or select specific locations to watch for images. You can quickly organise your photos into albums, and organise multiple albums into "collections" (the albums in a collection are grouped together in the album list on the left of the screen. The majority of your screen is dedicated to viewing the photos themselves, either as thumbnails (in one of two sizes) grouped by album, or as a a small preview of an individual photo.

In the preview mode, you have the ability to perform a couple of simple automatic adjustments to the image - contrast & saturation (courtesy of the 'enhance' button) or red-eye removal. You can also losslessly rotate your images in 90 degree clockwise steps (repeating the process if you want to rotate the image 180 degrees or counter-clockwise). More complex adjustments - or any kind of manual editing - will still need to be performed in another program; Picasa can launch your photo editor and have it load a specific image for you when this is necessary. All three viewing modes can be seen demonstrated in the thumbnails below.

Sharp-eyed viewers will notice a search function in the first screenshot above. The functionality of this search doesn't currently make the program well-suited to dealing with very large photo collections, as it allows the user only to search for words in album titles and descriptions. However, in talking to the company at last night's Digital Focus press event, we were told that captions for individual photos will be possible in an update which should be released in December. This is a significant change which will greatly expand the program's capabilities, and make it more appropriate for managing your photo collection.

Where Picasa really shines is in its very nicely designed photo sharing functions. A slideshow mode is coupled with what Lifescape calls a "timeline" - somewhat similar to a feature from Canon's ZoomBrowser software, although instead of being able to scroll through your individual photos by the time they were taken, you scroll through entire albums by date. The slideshow can either be manually controlled with a small toolbar at the bottom of the screen, or set to automatically change photos every few seconds. Two nice visual touches are the "fade" transition between images in an automatic slideshow, and the way the timeline uses an image from each album as a stylish looking backdrop whilst you choose an album. A few more transition types for the slideshow might be a nice addition to a future version, but all in all we're very impressed with this portion of the program.

Note that we encountered a minor bug in the software in the timeline and slideshow, which Lifescape is currently working on solving. On certain graphics cards - apparently including the ATI Rage Mobility M1 AGP in Mike's laptop - the timeline and slideshow (the latter only when in auto mode) are shown at VGA (640 x 480) resolution, rather than the computer's default resolution. This should hopefully be fixed soon, but in the meantime note that the low-resolution screenshot above is not indicative of the quality of this screen on most graphics cards.

Sharing photos is a snap in Picasa. Simply select one or more images from your albums, and small thumbnails will appear in a holding area at the bottom of the screen. Click the 'hold' button, and you can select another batch of images without the first being dropped from this holding area. Once you've found all the images you want, a quick click of either the 'Print', 'E-mail', 'Export' or 'Order Prints' buttons will take you to the relevant portion of the program.

The 'Print' button brings up a new screen (below) where you can choose to print a full-page print, 4" x 6" prints (two per page), 3.5" x 5" prints (four per page), or contact sheets with up to 42 thumbnails per page. You can also choose whether to crop your images top and bottom, or add borders left and right to make them match the aspect ratio of the standard print sizes. Duplicate prints can be made by clicking 'plus' and 'minus' buttons, and you can select and setup your printer. Finally, you can opt for standard mode ("Good quality, compatible with most printers' resolutions, especially HP.") or optimised mode ("Highest quality, uses your printer's resolution. Test on inexpensive paper first.") We've not had a chance to test the print quality achieved by Picasa (Mike's actually writing this article from the press room at Comdex) but the interface is certainly friendly and simple for a beginner to understand.

The 'E-mail' button gives you two choices - to send your images via Microsoft Outlook, or through Picasa's own email routine. Your selection can be saved and the question skipped in future if you choose. Images are resized and recompressed automatically for you, and attached to a blank email. The size and compression ratio are not currently user adjustable, but again in talking to Lifescape reps we learned that they're planning to add some user control over this process.

The 'Export' button simply allows you to make duplicates of the images you selected, either in their original resolution or resized to 320, 640 or 1024 pixels wide in a new folder on your PC. Finally, the 'Order Prints' button is self-explanatory - click on it, and your images are automatically uploaded to Lifescape, and you can then choose print sizes and quantities for delivery by mail. We've not attempted to test this portion of the program as yet.

Unlike some competing programs which we mentioned recently, Picasa is not being offered free through co-branding or print revenues, but is instead available at a cost of $29.99. For a first incarnation, the result is fairly impressive - the program has a very clean, attractive interface and is simple to learn and use. Equally impressive is the company's commitment to making the program even better. In talking with company reps, we mentioned a number of small points that we'd like to see changed, and were told that the next release to be available as a free upgrade in December will address these issues. In fact, on several points Lifescape staff told us that features were to be added before we'd even asked about them - the company is obviously listening closely to customers and reviewers, and working to satisfy their requests. As well as the planned updates already mentioned in this item, features such as compatibility with a wider range of graphics formats (including MPEG video) and more are on the way...

There's getting to be quite a lot of competition amongst software vendors to offer a digital equivalent of the shoebox that you likely stored your film prints in, and with a little more development to extend the functionality slightly, we have no doubt that Lifescape will have a worthy challenger on their hands.