Perhaps Picasa will do the job for you?
Depends how far he wants to look ahead.
If he wants a short-term quick-fix resolution to the problem, then sure, Picassa (or Flickr or any other of the freebies).
If he wants a long-term solution that scales and with a range of functionality he can grow into ... something like Lightroom (or its competitors) are what he should be looking at.
Lightroom & Co. vs Picassa is chalk and cheese !
What you don't want to do is one day find yourself with 10000 or 100000 images in Picasa, a friend shows you what Lightroom (or a competitor) can do and you think "bugger, that looks good". The transition will be painful between DAM software will be painful, I can guarantee you that ! Even if they provide helpful migration tools... there will still be manual work involved.... and the more photos you accumulate, the more painful the transition will be. So choose wisely, take your time....