Good Stuff Cheap

A digital camera program, for free, Picassa by name.  I came upon it after suffering thru the program that came with the camera ( a Kodak) .  The Kodak program was such a ramhog that I had to buy another memory stick to prevent lock up, it was slow, and it kept trying to put all my photos on the Kodak for-pay website. 
  Picassa does the down-load-from-camera part with grace and ease.  You plug your camera in to the USB and Picassa recognizes it.  Picassa keeps track of what you have already downloaded to hard disk, and only downloads stuff from the camera that is NOT on the hard disk.  Very handy for those of us that leave photos in the camera after we download them.  Prevents the build up of multiple copies of the same thing on the hard disk.
  Picassa allows grouping of photos into "albums" which you can name useful things like "Trip to Uncle Joe's" or "Christmas at Grandmothers".  It allows hierarchical album structures such as "Model Trains" with sub albums such as "Structures" and "Rolling Stock"  And the best thing about Picassa is the albums show up in Windows Explorer as file directories by the same names. Which makes working with your photos with other programs a lot more straight forward.  You can locate a photo to upload to the web, or burn to CD-ROM, or attach to an email using the same names you use inside Picassa.  All too many photo programs hide the photos out on disk in random number named files making it difficult-to-impossible to work with your photos with any ordinary Windows programs (browsers, CD-Rom burners or email).  Picassa got this one right.
   Picassa allows you to put a caption on each photo, and the captions stick.  I can upload a Picassa captioned photo to Facebook and the caption uploads with the picture and shows up in Facebook without me having to type it in again.  
  Picassa will retouch photos for you.  You can fix under exposure, bad color, red-eye, and a number of other things.  The red eye corrector is cute.  It uses face recognition to outline the subject's eyes and then it makes the red pixels go away.  Turns red eyed demons back into cute and adorable children. 
  The face recognition part of Picassa goes thru all your pictures matching up faces.  When you assign a name to one face, than all the other photos with that face get the name.  You get a list of all your named people and their photo's.  The face recognition is darn good, gets it right most of the time. 
  If you are into digital photography, Picassa is the way to go.  And it's free.