Picasa is Google-owned photo-editing software.  It was actually created by someone else and bought by Google, but that's a different story.  I've known about it for a while now, but I always sort of dismissed it as "grandma software", i.e. software that's created for computer illiterate people like grandmas (no offense).  But a few months ago, Wendy was looking for some simple yet powerful photo editing software, so I recommended it (no offense to Wendy).  It turns out it's pretty powerful, and it has some awesome features that are easy to learn and use.  Wendy used it to do a sort of color focus effect on a few pictures I had taken.  Basically, it makes the whole picture black and white except for a select object or area.  It's a cool effect that makes the one colored object in the picture really stand out. 

And then just last week, I decided to get sick of my method of organizing pictures.  Ever since I got a digital camera in 2002, I've had a system of renaming pictures based on their date and event (e.g. "04-11 - Event.jpg").  The renaming process wasn't that big of a deal, especially after my discovery of Windows' built-in renaming capabilities.  The problem was that I would let several months worth of pictures accumulate on my camera before I transferred them to the computer, which meant I had to spend time renaming lots and lots of files.  Plus, the renaming system seemed a bit futile because the names didn't add much to the actual picture.  I know what a cat looks like.  I don't need to name my picture "04-11 - Cat.jpg". 

That's when I remembered Picasa has some good organizing capabilities.  It has the ability to add tags and descriptions that don't affect the filename.  In fact, it doesn't even display the filename; it displays the pictures in date order, which is exactly what my renaming system was doing anyway.  It seems to make picture organizing at least a little faster.  Plus, it displays and plays videos right along with pictures, which matches up quite nicely with my newfound love of videography.