Forget Chrome, the most exciting product to come out this week from Google is Picasa 3 Beta, the latest version of their free photo editing and management software. Picasa has long-remained my favorite of the free photo programs, offering simple slider-bar controls to powerful editing features and album creation tools. In this new edition they deliver a tremendous list of new features and upgrades including a blemishing tool, collage maker, video editor, photo previewer, support for multi-word tags and geo-tagging photos to Google Earth, synchronized edits with web albums, screen capture, improved red-eye and cropping, new slideshow and screensaver creation tools, and captioning amongst many more. Here’s some of my favorite features.

Blemish Tool – In Photoshop, the Clone tool allows you to pick an area on a photo to sample and then use it to paint over blemishes and areas you’d like to remove, in Picasa the blemish tool has you first click on the area you wish to remove and then it creates a preview, allowing you to move your cursor about the photo to look for a suitable match. You can actually see what the effect will look like before you apply it.

Cropping – Picasa begins by offering three automatically generated cropping selections, complete with preview thumbnails. If you don’t like those you can choose from a long list of image ratios, including sizes for HDTV screens and widescreen monitors and a manual mode that lets you alter the boundaries on any of the previous options.

Red-Eye – Admittedly not the strongest part of the first Picasa releases, the improved tool now auto-detects and fixes red eye in photos and does a better job of colour-matching the pupils. It leaves the selection boxes on, so you know what changes it has made and you can simply click on a box to remove the fix. This is on top of the manual mode where you can draw your own selection boxes.

Photo Viewer – Rather than load up Picasa proper, you can now quickly view photos from a file folder just as you might normally with Windows Photo and Fax Viewer, except Picasa’s has a better interface, applying a transparency to your whole desktop with a smooth preview bar at the bottom that displays thumbnails of the other photos in the same location. You can move the photo around on your desktop, zoom in using your mouse’s scrollwheel, and watch the collection as a slideshow. Shotcuts give you quick access to either upload the photo or edit it fully in Picasa. This is how I will be displaying still photos on our television show from now on.

Collages – Picasa can auto-generate a collage from any picture folder, creating your choice of mosaic, grid, picture pile, and contact sheet patterns. You can even super impose photos over each other and add in video clips, arranging the elements around with your mouse. You can select background colours and format the results specifically for widescreen monitors and HDTVs.

Video-Editing – Picasa has always had the ability to include videos in its library, now it can perform basic edits, allowing you to add title cards, soundtracks, and package video clips and still photos together with a selection of transition effects including dissolves and wipes. Once you're done there’s a built-in option to upload the clip to YouTube. It’s not very impressive, but useful for the most basic operations.

Face Recognition– I like the idea, although in this Beta version of Picasa 3, the feature underperforms in its ability to look through a folder of images and select the ones with human faces on them. In my tests it missed the best matches for shots that barely had faces in them.

Windows Only – Sadly, Google hasn’t addressed Mac or Linux users with this update, leaving Picasa 3 a Windows-only program.Picasa 3 manages to deliver a wider range of semi-professional features, allowing it to encroach on replacing the need for Photoshop amongst many users, without having to sacrifice any sense of intuitive controls or clean organization. This new version offers more features and improvements than most software revisions on the market have and I consider it the best choice of the free photo editing suites available.