I still remember the first time I saw Picasa (I just don’t remember where it was). The photo management tool was still an Idealab product, still shareware, and only available for Windows.

Even back then, I knew I could recommend Picasa to my Mom for her digital photo management needs and she’d be happy – and I was right about that. It was fast, easy, fun, clean, and quite good. It’s (largely) always been the best photo editing software I’ve used.

When Google acquired Picasa, they didn’t do much with it for a long while. At first, Picasa was ported to Linux – which was a bit baffling, but (at that point) I was primarily running Windows, so it didn’t bother me much. When Google finally ported Picasa to Mac OS X, I was overjoyed.

What you should keep in mind (and I still have a tough time explaining this to my parents) is that Picasa doesn’t actually store your photos inside of it. Your images stay tucked away at various and sundry locations throughout your system’s drives – Picasa just proactively scans those storage devices for the latest media, then collects it in an easy-to-use viewer. Simple!

Picasa isn’t Photoshop, but you can still use Picasa to unlock powerful photo editing features. Moreover, when you’re ready to push your photos (AND videos) to the web, it’s a simple click away from your fingertips.

While it’s not perfect, I still believe that Picasa (especially now that it’s free) is the best digital photo editor and viewer available for desktop systems. If you haven’t downloaded and installed Picasa yet, I’m not sure what you’re waiting for?