I have just tried out Picasa for the first time. I love all the
browsing & editing features, so well designed! ...but sadly I think I
am going to have to ditch Picasa after all, and look for different
photo mangement software.  Why? because I simply want to save my
changes back to file.

I've read this
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13537&topic=-1

I understand that is a deliberate design feature. It's clever that I
can undo changes if I decide later that I cropped away too much, but at
the same time I just want my changes saved back to the original files,
so that I can see my changes when I view the files in windows or other
apps, and I just feel like I *have* the changes, and they're not locked
away in Picasa's mysterious internal storage.

I understand that I can 'export' or 'save a copy', but neither of these
make it easy to actually replace your original files. After lots of
clicks, and moving around of files, I have to trick Picasa into
re-scanning them and treating them as the originals. If did this for
all changes, as I work with my collection, it would drive me mad, but
also I would forget to do it in places, then I'd end up in real pickle.

I suppose I'd like to see a global config option which puts picasa in
'destructive editing' mode. i.e. all changes are saved to the files.