GameCyte

"Remote Play," "Life with PlayStation," "PlayStation Home," all are lovely features when considering their low, low price of free -- but our time is valuable as well, and none of PlayStation Network's free applications have been interesting, capable or accessible enough to divert PS3 owners' attention from the fact that the $50-a-year Xbox LIVE just nabbed Netflix.

But now, Sony has come up with a free PS3 application that's so well put together, it might actually be worth paying for: the "Photo Gallery."

A 105 MB download from PlayStation Network (after installing yesterday's 2.60 firmware update), Sony's "Photo Gallery" is in some ways exactly what you'd expect:  a tool that allows you to put together slideshows and photo albums to show off to friends and relatives. But with "Photo Gallery," it's not the end result that's remarkable -- it's how you get there.

Starting off in the Photo Library -- which isn't a set of folders but rather a path literally and visually tracing your entire photographic history -- you can browse through every photograph on the console's hard drive by date, the PS3 automatically sorting photos into batches based on the EXIF metadata from your camera.

But you're not limited to date, because the PS3 can analyze your images and recognize color, the number of people in a picture, their relative age, even whether or not they are smiling, and let you sort based on a combination of those Group variables as well. Don't remember which year that girl in the red dress gave you that killer smile? Filter out only the primarily Red images that are With Smiles, and it'll probably turn up. Groups weren't  flawless in our testing -- a good number of children showed up when we selected Adults, for instance -- but the PS3 did well sorting colors, and flashed us plenty of big, beaming smiles upon request.

Once you find the photos, creating albums is a breeze. Smoothly zooming out from one full-size photo all the way out to a block of as many as 120 thumbnails on a virtual scrapbook, you can highlight each one you want with Square, then tap R1 to immediately send all of them, at the same time, into an album. Rearranging them in the scrapbook is as easy as holding Square and dragging the photos into their new position. Add a photo frame, title and music from your PS3's hard drive, and you're done.

Busy as Sony's servers were last night, it took the better part of an hour to download firmware update 2.6 and the "Photo Gallery" application, and another hour to upload multiple gigabytes of pictures through a TVersity streaming media server to a waiting PS3. But with "Photo Gallery," it only took minutes to sort through those multiple gigabytes for every picturesque nature scene I shot in a 2005 trip to Japan, transfer them to an custom album, and set up a professional, interactive slideshow set to the song of my choice.

The only major thing missing, in our opinion? The ability to send the final product to a relative's PS3.