Picasa's big gimmick is its "timeline" view, which takes over the entire screen, displays dots along the bottom corresponding to individual albums, shows a few photographs for each album in a big swoosh that moves across the screen, and displays a low-contrast black-and-white image across the background to set the mood. Some graphic artist spent a lot of time on this display. Personally, I don't care for it.

Picasa 1.0 also has the typical bugs and limitations that one would expect in a Release 1.0 program. The good news is that a 1.1 program will be released later this month. Long term, however, the program must handle image formats other than JPEG, integrate archiving, and include better tools for editing the information associated with images, as well as the images themselves.

But despite these problems, in many ways Picasa is the best thing going for managing personal digital images. (Professional tools, such as Canto's Cumulus, offer more features, but prices start north of $1,000.) The chronological ordering is certainly head-and-shoulders above the tools from Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and Sony. It's also quite fast-the program handled my entire photo archive without any trouble at all. The interface is a visual delight, and the program is a real pleasure to use.

Finally, in a discussion of digital photography, I would be remiss to forget Hewlett Packard's new deskjet 450 printer, introduced just a few weeks ago. The printer lists at $349.99, but you can find it for $300 if you look around.

Weighing just under five pounds, the 450 is a portable inkjet printer that's equally happy running off its compact power supply or its detachable lithium-ion battery. The printer features the traditional parallel and USB interfaces, but it also has a compact-flash reader, allowing you to take a compact-flash module out of your camera and print the images directly, without having to go through your computer (provided that your camera supports the DPOF standard for specifying which photos you want printed). The printer also has both an infrared and a Bluetooth adapter, allowing you to print from laptops, handhelds, and even Bluetooth-enabled cell phones.

Hewlett Packard claims that this printer will print "up to 9" pages per minute; in my tests, a page takes somewhere between 20 seconds and 45 seconds, depending on how much print is on it. The real benefit of this printer is that it lets you print in a motel room, in your car, or even on a train. This printer makes digital photography almost as easy as shooting a Polaroid instant print-except its results are bigger, they look better, and can be printed over and over again.

The 450 takes Hewlett Packard's new 56/57/58 inkjet cartridges, meaning you can print photos with either four colors or six (the more colors you use, the better a photograph looks). Hewlett Packard claims that these inks are archival and will last "generations." Of course, there's no easy way to test this claim, so it's probably a good idea to keep your original digital files as well.

Digital imaging has certainly come a long way. With the combination of a good modern digital camera, a good image management system, and a printer, most people can have the pleasure of shooting parties, friends and special events, keep the images for years, and never have to invest the time, energy, and space in creating binders like the ones I have upstairs. Now if only there was some easy way to get all of those old binders into digital format

Next month I'll be taking a break from computers and explore what's happening in the world of LED illumination.