Google's Picasa software is a powerful tool for managing your photo collection. It provides a simple interface for organizing your pictures, as well as some easy-to-use, yet powerful image manipulation tools. However, until recently the Windows version of Picasa has had some features that put it above the Linux version; some of these features, like Picasa Web Album integration, are at the core of the program, without which Picasa isn't very useful. With its newest release, the Linux version is being brought up to par with its Windows counterpart.

Google's Picasa is all about photos -- it helps you instantly find, edit, and share all the pictures on your computer. Although it isn't released as open source it is free to download and use from Google's Web site. The new version 3, which is currently in beta, is available for Windows as well as Linux.

Thats true. Now you can install and get the latest updates of Google Picasa in Ubuntu by adding these repositories. Here is how you do it.

Linux users really love Google Picasa even though it's not a native Linux application (unpack the .deb and you'll notice some wine.exe and other such files). Reading the comments from our "best linux photo manager / organizer" post, it seems face recognition is the feature that attracts people the most to Picasa.

Well, it seems Google Picasa will have a serious native Linux competitor,

Currently if you want to mail photos from Picasa 3 in Thunderbird 3 fails due to this bug .

The Yorba developers have released version 0.5.0 of their open source Shotwell photo manager for the GNOME desktop, adding support for Google's Picasa Web Albums service and printing

...when Google released Picasa 3.5 for Windows, leaving Linux users behind with the older 3.0 release, I decided that it was time to move on. After testing different photo editing and management applications for Linux, I settled for digiKam.

With the recent release of Picasa 3 Beta for Linux, Google has contributed more code to the WINE project.

Good OS (gOS) has achieved a major new release of its Ubuntu-based operating system. Targeting OEMs that want quickly customizable Linux netbook OSes, gOS 3.0 integrates closely with Google Gadgets, as well as with Google Mail, Calendar, Reader, News, Applications, Picasa, and so on.