Google bought Picasa a while back, & that was an excellent move on their part, as Picasa is first class software. On the Windows platform, Picasa is really the best there is in its class: photo & image management. Heck, there's an argument to be made that it's even better than iPhoto on Mac OS. Now Google has gotten Picasa to work on Linux through the wondrous magic of WINE; in fact, they've contributed over 100 patches to the WINE project, which is just totally cool. Quit reading me, & head over to the Picasa for Linux page, & download & install that sucker! (Check out all of our posts on Picasa, image management, & Google.) ...

Picasa is very cool, but there's a problem: it only runs on Windows. iPhoto is nifty, but there's an issue: it only runs on Mac OS X. What's a Linux user to do? Well, you can always try out Lphoto, Linspire's photo manager that is, uh, inspired by iPhoto. I've used it, and it works nicely, but it only works with JPEG images. Still, for what it is, it's not bad at all. (To install it, I used klik). Another good app is F-spot. It's based on mono, which is basically a port of MSFT's .NET to Linux, and it's also got some nice features, but it too only works with JPEGs. Not to mention, I like the fact that it includes the ability to add tags to pictures, but lighten up with the structure, OK? Just let me tag the freakin' photos like I do with Flickr - there's no need for me to have to hierarchically organize all the tags! Now, I realize that the word "photo" is in the name of one program, and implied by the other, but still … I want a tool that manages IMAGES, not just PHOTOS. GIFs, ...