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Decrease your bandwidth usage and save yourself some editing time with Smush.it, a web-based image optimization service. Although designed with web site optimization in mind, Smush.it doesn’t discriminate. Dump a bunch of images in, and smush.it shaves them down. The service strips metadata and recompresses the images to decrease the file size, while its compression algorithm does an excellent job preserving image quality with little to no visible artifacts. More »

Windows only: Concerned you’re wasting disk space with duplicate photos but too cautious to go about wantonly deleting pics? Fire up VisiPics and find those dupes. VisiPics is an extremely thorough program. Many duplicate checkers are limited to comparing the file name, size, and date of creation to compare files and flag them as duplicates. VisiPics uses an algorithm to examine each picture and compare it to the rest, seeking out similarities based on the actual More »

Google has officially released their popular photo management application Picasa for Macs, after years of offering Picasa as a free Windows download. More »

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The Flickr Gallery Plus Firefox extension or Grease monkey script make browsing galleries faster and easier in Flickr. More »

Citing a supposed inside source, the Googling Google blog says it’s plausible that a free Mac OS X version of Picasa, one of our favorite photo organizers, could drop next week.

The post notes that two other statements by Google—about Picasa launching “later this year” and “larger presentations” at Macworld—point to exactly this kind of launch, and, for all the comments we’ve seen around here whenever Picasa is mentioned, it would certainly rank as an attention-getter at a conference where Steve Jobs won’t be making a big splash.