Picasa vs. Windows Live Photo Gallery

In a previous Mainstream Guide, called Getting Control of Your Digital Photos , we did a spring housecleaning on the digital photos on your computer. We rounded them up and put them into a date-based file structure, got rid of duplicates, and added information into the files that lets us find photos by their subject matter without looking at each one individually.

If you do nothing else than follow those steps, most folks will be in much better shape than they were, but I mentioned that there are other programs, notably Picasa, that will let you get more enjoyment from your photos and share them more easily with friends and family.

Picasa is the best known of this category of software, but Microsoft added a worthy competitor to the mix, in the summer of 2007, called Windows Live Photo Gallery. I think these two programs are the best of their breed.

This short video introduces the genre, and sets up a head-to-head comparison of these two worthy competitors.