Picasa 3 (Currently in Beta) is a free and powerful Image Management and editing application from Google.

You can fix red-eye, fine tune the light, turn color pictures into black and white and create polaroid effect all with just a click of button.

Picasa can watch folders for images and add them to your library. You can also upload the images to Picasa Web Albums by signing into your Google account. Currently it has a 1GB limit for free accounts.

In Main windows you can do simple tasks such as adding tags to your images, rating and exporting your images.

Google has included quite a few simple image editing and enhancement features for your images. In Basic Fixes you have Crop, Redeye, Auto Contrast, Auto color and text.

Click on Tuning Tab to fine tune your images with tools such as Fill light, Highlights, etc.

Click on Effects for more.

Click on Collage to create collages.

Another interesting feature of Picasa is it's ability to create image slideshows and one click upload to Youtube. You can add transition styles, captions and export your movies to windows movie maker format.

Personally I found it to be a great application for simple day to day tasks and great alternative to Photoshop for those who just want to do simple editing with their images. Download it here http://picasa.google.com/