3. Picasa

In the world of search Google is king, but when it comes to online photo sharing Google is still figuring things out with Picasa.

Picasa is Google's photo sharing service and includes both offline (desktop) and web albums as well. Similar to Flickr, if you already have a Google account you can use that for the Picasa Web Albums feature, otherwise it's a simple matter to sign up for one. For the purposes of this review tested the current Picasa Version 2.7 client.

The online experience is considerably muted at present, compared to what the full offline Picasa client offers. Picasa Web Albums does not offer any image enhancement or editing options beyond adding captions to photos.

The offline and online clients are not fully integrated to let you view the online photos within the Picasa desktop client. Uploading to the Web Albums feature for sharing is easy enough with one click access to an integrated upload feature, though.

When it comes to sharing, Picasa allows for user defined tags that help to group and locate images. Web Albums recently added a new mapping feature as well, which is similar to what Flickr does. Sharing of images is also similar to Flickr in that you can specify public or not, with non-public images still viewable without logging in if you send an invitation with a specific URL that allows for access.

The offline client offers a nice set of image enhancement features, including one auto-fix button (called I'm Feeling Lucky, just like Google's Search).

Basic fixes include also include crop, straighten, redeye, auto contrast, auto color and fill light. More advanced adjustments (what Google calls "Tuning") include fill light (again), highlights, shadows and color temperature. Effects provided by Picasa include sharpen, sepia, black and white, warmify, film grain, tint, saturation, soft focus, glow, filtered black and white, focal black and white and graduated tint.

The desktop client also has a very powerful image discovery engine that will locate every image on the target media device (like your hard drive) and will continue to identify and allow you to index any new images that you acquire over time.

Storage pricing for the Web Albums feature varies based on how much storage you need. Under 1 GB is free, with four tiers of pricing after that: 7 GB for $25 per year, 26 GB for $100 per year, 101 GB for $300 per year and 251 GB for $500 per year.

Google doesn't own its own image printing service (yet), so users get to choose either Photoworks or Shutterfly (which is also reviewed in this article). In limited testing, we experienced difficulty in getting images from Picasa to transfer directly to Shutterfly's print service. No such difficulty was encountered in the same circumstances with the same images when attempting to print with Photoworks.