In our last installment of “Essential Software” we’ll look at photo editing and management software. There are only two products I’ve ever needed when it comes to this task. One has been around forever, and one is a relative newcomer. The first one is ThumbsPlus by Cerious Software. They have put together a great package to manage all your images in your already created folders and it has some very advanced tasks that make your life easier. For example, you can batch process many images at once. If you like the way they do red eye removal, click a whole folder and apply the filter to it. The latest version of their software goes for $49.95 and is well worth it.

The second image management program I’d like to draw attention to is Picasa which was purchased by Google sometime last year. This software is free and works very fast for thumbnailing and browsing pictures. I also prefer Picasa’s web page wizard over the more complex (yet more powerful) offering by Cerious. It is really just 2 steps to get a page ready to be put online. The Picasa interface itself is very friendly and its easy to use. You can grab this software over at Google.