If you’re looking for a simple, cool, free photo manager, go download Picasa! I’ve been using Windows Explorer to manage my photos, so it’s a great improvement for me. Why? Well:

• It has a great interface for moving photos from a Memory Stick into the My Pictures folder.
• It automatically finds the pictures on my hard drive and displays thumbnails for all of them in a smooth-scrolling view.
• You can use really small thumbnails to see hundreds of images at a time, or really big thumbnails to see good detail when looking for a particular picture.
• It’s easy (and fast!) to rotate photos.
• It’s easy to remove red-eye from a photo, and it does a very good job.
• It has a great cropping tool. In fact, it has a feature I’ve been looking for – it can keep the cropping rectangle at a 3 x 5 ratio to ensure my prints don’t get clipped!
• It has nice slideshow support.
• It supports videos as well as photos.
• It has good keyboard shortcuts for most operations.
• It does everything very quickly, even on my slow machine at home.

It has a number of other cool features that I won’t use as often, including an interactive timeline view. I’m sure it doesn’t hold a candle to more powerful photo managers, but considering the price (free!), I’m really enjoying Picasa.

(Thanks to Scott Watermasysk for the link!)