Ease of Use:  

Picasa is incredibly easy to use. New features such as the Retouching tool make getting rid of blemishes easy. Also, their new Redeye button in the basic fixes tab is able to locate the red eyes in the picture and adjust appropriately.

Editing:  

There are three convenient tabs for editing:

1. Basic Fixes: These are buttons that work in one to two clicks to remove red-eye, crop, auto color, auto contrast, straighten and fill light photos.
2. Effects: Designed to help you turn a gray sky blue, brighten colors and add photographic filters. There are 12 effects to choose from in Picasa including Sharpen, Sepia, Black and White, Warmify, Film Grain, Tint, Saturation, Soft Focus, Glow, Filtered B&W, Focal B&W, and Graduated Tint.
3. Tuning: Here are the most advanced editing features to fix contrast and remove color cast. Select from Fill Light, Highlight, Shadows, Color Temperature, and the Neutral Color Picker.

Bonus Features

• "I'm Feeling Lucky": Takes the guesswork out and enhances photos automatically
• Geotagging: Tell Picasa where you shot each photo, and view them on a 3-D globe in Google Earth
• Text Tool: With this new feature you can add text to any picture, edit the text, and place it where ever you want on the picture.
• Picasa now has the a simplistic movie making feature using the short clips you’ve captured with your digital camera.

Organizing:  

Assign keywords to your photos and then use Albums to organize just the way you want to. Albums are virtual groupings of photos that only exist in the Picasa software. Like a playlist, you can create combinations of any photos in an album or use a single image in multiple albums without taking up extra space on your hard drive. If you delete photos in albums, or whole albums, the original picture files will be untouched. 

Help/Support:  

Picasa has a brief online tutorial, an online user forum, and technical support by email.

For a basic photo editing package, Picasa is a useful tool. And, it’s free … we like that, and so will you.