Google has just released Picasa 2, a new and improved version of their free photo manager. In addition to the basic functionality offered by the first version Google released after acquiring Picasa last year, this new version offers a number of new features and better integration with Google's other software offerings including Hello (photo sharing), blogger.com, and Gmail.

New features include:

• Find the pictures you forgot you had. Picasa searches your entire hard drive for folders with pictures in them.

• Move and re-name pictures from inside Picasa.

• Make a label. Labels make virtual collections ("pictures of my dog") easy to create, even if the photos are scattered across many folders.

• Add a star rating. Like Gmail's stars, this just lets you highlight important or favorite images.

• Keep one picture in multiple albums. "Instances" are like shortcuts in the file system.

• Password-protect collections.

A number of features are also improved including the image correction tools.