In continuing the Favorite Tools series, I present you with my favorite tools for photo and image management.
Picasa
Link: http://picasaweb.google.com/
What can I say about Picasa? Frankly, it rocks. Being the Google fanboy that I am, it's only natural that I'd appreciate this tool. In a nutshell, it organizes all of the photos and images in your My Documents folder and all subfolders. It allows you to create albums and upload those albums to Picasa Web, your personal online photo album from Google. It lets you link your Picasa albums with Blogger, GeoTag your photos, create screensavers, export your pictures to HTML pages for use on other sites and adjust image quality/attributes. The viewer included with version 3 is quite slick and just fun to use. And there's even a Facebook plugin that lets you bulk upload images directly into a Facebook album with a single click. And really, I'm sure I've only scraped the surface, especially with the gamut of plugins available for extensible architectures like this.
AutoStitch
Link: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
One of the best tools I've ever come across. You basically take a bunch of pictures, and as long as there's some overlap this app will stitch them together to form a massive panorama. Can be used for taking 360 degree panoramas, or even complete spheres if the desire arises. And far better than equivalent pay-for apps that supposedly do the same thing.
GIMP
Link: http://www.gimp.org/
No, not some dude in a leather mask. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It's basically a free version of Photoshop. Sure, it may not do quite as much as Photoshop, but unless you're an uber-skilled professional graphics guru, do you really need that much power? I sure don't. Also, it's WAY easier to use. Far more intuitive, IMHO. I've used it for all of the Dos Gringos imagery and marketing materials, and plan to continue using it for a lot more. Great free tool.
Basically, with these three tools in your image arsenal, you really don't need anything else.
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