I have been using picasa 3 now and I find it to be much useful and has many great feature. first when I install picasa 3 then it will scan all available photo in my harddrive and will show it to me. To my suprise it did find all of my old photo there. actually my harddisk is so large that I sometime forget where did I put my file picture, but by using picasa it will indexed all the picture in my harddisk and show it to me.
another feature that I like is the ability of picasa to recognize faces. so picasa will selects a face in one of our photos and then will instructs us to write their name. this is a great feature I think, kind of like tagging people faces in facebook. so it will be easy for us to find our friends in our photo just by searching for their name and picasa will show the picture of our friends in group. just like the picture below.
But if you have a large collection of photo and you want to store it online in picasa then you can only store 1 GB of photo collection. I suggest you should upgrade your storage by paying more to google. actually you need to have an account online to put all of your picture so that in case of something bad happen you won’t lose your photos. this always happened to me so that’s why I upgrade my storage for photo collections but not in picasa. for storing large picture I usually use multiply. I did have a premium account there, but I do this in my multiply account as it costs me $20 per year and since then I had stored all of my high-resolution picture and also my videos so I won’t ever lose them again. 
so the word of advice is that to always respects your photo and the only way to do that is by putting them online so you will always have it.
