Google recently released Picasa version 3.5 of its photo management software. The key new feature of this release is name tags which provides the ability to tag your pictures with the name of the person or persons in the picture.
For those of you who use Facebook, it features very similar tagging mechanism; however, Picasa also provides facial recognition, so once you identify a person once (or twice) it will scan all of your photos and identify other photos containing the same person.
Once you have tagged your photos, you now have "photo albums" by person, which you can view and perform other features.
In addition the name tagging features carries over to Picasa's Web Albums, if you set your privacy settings to allow it.
When you factor in features such as the ability to embed in a slideshow of your web album, Picasa provides a lot of utility for your photo handling needs.
A couple of caveats, one is that Picasa is not at the same level as Flickr in terms of community and features professional photographers need.
Secondly, the name tagging feature is designed to work at the workstation level vs. at the picture or network level. This means if you have multiple PCs they will not share the naming work you perform on the initial PC. Plus you have to back up both a configuration file and database files. Here is a link to good thread on the topic.
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