Photo Software

• Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0
• This software is pretty slick. Once you have so many photos on your hard drive, you need to catalog them (more than just by folder name), and that's what this software does. It lets you tag all of your images with metadata (which means data about data), such that I can put a "Brian" or "Hiking" tag on any photo I've got, then later on I can say, "Hey, what hiking photos did I take?"
  Additionally, it provides basic touch-ups like red-eye reduction, rotation, color balancing, etc. It costs about $50.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 <-- Brian recommends this one
• This is the newest version of Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 (see above), despite the fact that the name doesn't indicate it. This contains a watered-down, easy to use variant of Photoshop (a wonderful photo tool), plus the Organizer, which is essentially Adobe Photoshop Album. Unlike Album 2.0, though, the interface is improved and it lets you save the tag information with your photo (so when you email your photo to a friend with the same software, they will receive your tags as well...important to some people like myself).
  
  This contains a lot more features than Album 2.0 does, so if you want to do more than simple fixes, this is a great tool. The slideshow features are far better than those in Album 2.0, so if you want to make neat slideshows for friends, I recommend this one. It costs about $100.
• Adobe Photoshop Album 3.0 SE <-- Brian recommends this one if you want it for free
• So you want the cataloging features of Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 or Elements 4.0, but want it free? This is your tool. Still more full featured than Google Picasa, this tool has almost all the catalog capabilities of the full Album 2.0 and Elements 4.0, with fewer editing abilities. Plus it's free!
• Picasa
• This is another fantastic photo catalog. The big advantage of this is that it's free! Even better, it's made by Google! It's almost as good as Photoshop Album, and better in some respects. All in all, it's a significant step up from using the cheap software that comes with your camera to organize your photos.
• ArcSoft Panorama Maker
• Normally, for a good panorama, I'll pull my photos into Adobe Photoshop (not Photoshop Album) and stitch them together by hand. Unfortunately, that's non-trivial, but it allows me to smudge over any stitching problems and perfect the image.
  
  Photoshop, unfortunately, requires a lot of Photoshop knowledge, and a lot of time...two things that not many people have. So, if you want a more automated panorama stitcher, this software works REALLY well to stitch together several photos into a seamless panorama. It's relatively inexpensive too.
• Microsoft PhotoStory
• Both catalogers above make slideshows that are very nice, but PhotoStory takes it a notch higher (much like iPhoto on the Mac). You can easily create a great slideshow that not only allows you to narrate each photo and add background music, but also adds something I've heard called, "The Ken Burns Effect".
  
  "The Ken Burns Effect" essentially lets you pan, zoom, or manipulate the images in between slides -- something that you always see whenever still photos are shown in a documentary (particularly, those by Ken Burns...). It makes the slideshow far more dynamic and watchable.