Thanks for starting this thread BigV, I love photography as a topic of discussion. I am not quite as bad as you with the sheer number of photos but give me time ... just checked and I am over 60k of digital photos ... hate to think of how many old print SLR pictures I have.
I had used picasa's simple upload tools in the past to push pictures to their website but never used the full up tool until it was mentioned here. Just pulled off a copy and it is really neat! I normally use ACDsee Photo Manager 12 and I do love that for viewing and doing minor adjustments to photos but the face recognition functionality in Picasa is something I have always wanted ... too many times the wife has said she needed a couple pictures of someone ... and I then faced the task of navigating through a maze of folders to find some.
On the f-stops discussion, I have not stepped up to a DSLR yet ... I take so many pictures purely because I have a simple point-n-shoot camera in my pocket with me quite often. A DLSR is not something you can easily carry around with you everywhere and often, such as in the rain or at the beach, it is not something you want to expose to the moisture or conditions anyway.
I just bought a new Olympus XZ-1 point-n-shoot purely on the basis of wanting a "better" f-stop range, specifically this camera has a f1.8 lower end so it gathers a LOT of light for a PnS. It also has a large sensor size for a PnS - 1/1.63" (7.89x5.81mm) ... this is tiny when compared to a DLSR but it is large for a PnS.
All that said, I will probably be buying a full up DSLR this year .... just because I can ...
