Google bringing Picasa to Mac OS X
Picasa has been a popular and successful photo organizing tool from Google, for Windows, for a long time now. I guess Google never thought about bringing it to the Mac because, let’s face it, iPhoto has everything you need already. I was surprised when I heard that Google is going to launch a Mac version of Picasa. I’m not so sure this app will do so well - seeing as the majority of Mac users will either use iPhoto or Aperture to manage their photo libraries. And as for online photo storage, Flickr and .Mac seem to be popular amongst Mac users. But then again, they brought Google Desktop to the Mac - a direct competitor with one of Tiger and Leopard’s most notable features.
Duncan Riley of TechCrunch was lucky enough at the Macworld Expo this year to dig out the truth out of an unexperienced Google employee. It “is under development and will be launched later this year”. I guess I can’t complain about a product that isn’t launched yet. For Windows users, it’s probably the best application for free. But if you have the latest version of iPhoto, I can’t see a reason to switch.
Via [MacUser]
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> But if you have the latest version of iPhoto, I can’t see a reason to switch.
Reason #1: the latest version of iPhoto costs $79 (my iMac is two years old so it’s didn’t come with iLife ‘08)—I’m guessing the latest version of Picasa for Mac OS X will be free
Reason #2: my wife is the one who uses iPhoto and she used to like Picasa on our old Windows PC better—occassionally I’ll hear her say things like “this was easier in Picasa” or “Picasa would let me do xyz”, and I have to apologetically tell her that you can’t run Picasa on Mac—I expect she’ll be very happy to here she’ll have the choice of switching
on January 21, 2008 at 10:55 PM - LINKPicasa is one of the biggest things that I miss after the switch. I want to love iPhoto, but it just doesn’t make any sense to me. Picasa was logical and straightforward. I just don’t understand how things are supposed to be organized in iPhoto.
Aperture is nice, and when my photographer wife gets her MB, we’ll probably throw down for it, but until then I wait eagerly for Picasa.
on January 22, 2008 at 08:01 AM - LINKPicasa, eh… but where is Hello for Mac???
http://www.hello.com the best pic sharing software out there…
on January 22, 2008 at 09:32 AM - LINKI’ve been using Picassa and the very expensive Extensis. I’ve used Extensis for years and loved it. I switched to Picassa about a week after I starting using it and never regretted it. I found Picassa to be faster than Extensis, ( I have over 50,000 photo’s) and simply more convenient.
on January 28, 2008 at 12:44 AM - LINKNow that I have an iMAC I tried iphoto. I didn’t like it. So now I run Picassa using XP via Parallels on my MAC. I can’t wait for the OSX version of Picassa
I just got a MB last week and have tried Aperture, iPhoto and Lightroom and none of them compete with Picasa for 2 reasons in my book.
1. Search - the search in picasa was EASY - it searched folder names - why Aperture wont do this is beyond me - lots of people coming into aperture from elsewhere organized their photos by the folder name they were in - so why cant you search for folder names? That should be blazingly fast - but no… I am stuck with filter that takes 20 seconds to search through my 80K referenced images only to say it cant find anything.
2. Performance - I came from a 4yr old Pentium 4 PC that ran Picasa BEAUTIFULLY. Searching was as fast as I could type and it searched everything - including folder names. I have a 2 week old MB 2.2ghz C2D with 4GB of ram and Aperture is DOG SLOW (well - I have a Greyhound - so lets say its turtle slow) at times. Simply straightening an image out is so choppy its like trying to drift with a 85 Buick - overcompensate one way just to overcompensate the other - you end in a firey ball of flames.
on January 30, 2008 at 11:41 PM - LINKIf someone can out there can shed some light on the whole search thing - it would be much appreciated - I cant image Apple being this stupid.
Im a brand new Mac user (less than a week) and have managed to do an effortless switch to Max OS X and the peculiarities that come with the new OS. HOWEVER, being a dedicated Picasa user, I find myself on the edge of a breakdown when dealing with iPhoto. It completely SUCKS. It has the basic features that Picasa has but lack big time compared to the awesome Google Product. Try resizing your pictures before uploading them to the Mac galleries… I cant believe that Apple released such a useless photo managing program when third party applications like Picasa from Google (which is free b.t.w), can do a hundred times more than iPhoto.
Im severly dissapointed in iPhoto and cant wait for Picasa to be released for the Mac.
on January 31, 2008 at 10:58 AM - LINKAfter happily using picasa for af few years, i finally gave up on windows now much more happy having a mac, but i miss picasa severely!!!
Having tried iphoto, aperture, lightroom, lightzone, shoebox and a few others i totally gave up
None of them have the simple listing all photos and allowing me to do changes that can be saved - the simplicity fo picasa is the key, i allready have all my photos in folders and need to see them all, sort them and edit, saving and overwriting my originals (they are not holy)
I truly wonder why it has been made so complicated with all the import and keeping originals untouched - picasa saves them in a nice fodler called originals and lets me work on so i do not get tied to the program
Because this is the thing; using iphoto, aperture or lightroom all your changes and metadata will stick there, and the only way to get some of it out is to export to a new folder, but how about your folder structure and does it resave those which have not been change, the stars and titles, and if you want to keep doing a few changes here and there or move the file to another folder?
Nothing compares to picasa, on any system i have seen, and yes, it could be nice with curves and histogram adjustments, but those are minimal benifits to the lack of managing the photo library
Oh and dont even try to move or rotate a file in another porgram if it has been imported to iphoto (not even if you leave it where it was) - then if youre lucky you only have to rebuild the entire iphoto library, if youre unlucky, well, too bad…
My iphoto library is the the trash bin
Aurin
on February 28, 2008 at 01:31 PM - LINKFinland
As when, “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?“
on March 1, 2008 at 10:32 AM - LINKI run Windows on my Mac in Parallels only for the ability to be able to use Picasa. I’ve tried lots of them and none can hold a candle to Picasa for sheer speed and ease of browsing/organizing photos. Its cropping and quick fix tools are incomparable.
Want a larger sampling of opinion? Check out the March 28 post on the 5-best photo organizers on Lifehacker. Lots of other folks feel this way.
iPhoto? You gotta be kidding. Least useful (and most frustrating) of all the Mac apps. If I’m working within Mac, I’ll look or photos in the Finder before booting iPhoto. We can only hope that Apple and/or the public will embrace Mac Picasa when it sheds its glorious light on the world to help integrate it into the other Mac apps using photos (iWeb, Pages, iMovie, etc.)
on April 1, 2008 at 10:30 PM - LINKi just got the new mac and iphoto is crap compared to picassa. on picassa you can edit all your photos, and you can’t do anything on iphoto except view them. i can’t wait for picassa to come onto macs
on May 10, 2008 at 08:35 PM - LINKThe new iphoto is actually good for editing photos, and the comparision feature plus using the edited photos in mail or pages is ingenious.
Iphoto also has the absolute best tagging system, this alone would be worth using if the tags could be saved without selecting export for each folder or collection of pictures - iphoto totally lacks saving the edited photos as smart as picasa does (makig a folder for originals), and the ease of editing in picasa is truly nice, as long as iphoto has the idea of importing and exporting instead of simply looking at the photos where they are on the harddisk, it feels unsafe and as i usually carry my photos on a harddisk, i need the edited and foldersorted pictures, which is only possible in picasa.
Aperture can import the folderstructure upon start, but again, the folders are virtual inside aperture, so i did not buy it, although the editing is truly good.
on May 11, 2008 at 01:16 PM - LINKThree words: Picasa is better!!!
on May 14, 2008 at 01:48 PM - LINKHello, goodbye.
So much for the “best pic sharing software out there”:
Hello will be shut down on June 11th. We’ve extended this date to make sure we have enough time to communicate this as well as we can to our users.
on May 14, 2008 at 02:49 PM - LINKIPhoto is awful. Please google, bring us Picasa. I would gladly pay for it. We switched to Mac foolishly thinking it would be good for sorting and organizing photos, but we are ready to switch back. Photos are difficult to find and sort in IPhoto compared to other photo programs I use and apparently it shares one of the worst ITunes problems. When you update it wipes out all the keywords. This happened to us three times when we upgraded ITunes (all our playlists were erased). And some of the blogs are saying IPhoto does this too. We have 18,000 photos on our computer and we certainly don’t want to have to rename them all.
on May 25, 2008 at 03:20 PM - LINKI LOVE PICASA. i used to have a windows and picasa works SO well. i absolutely hate my iphoto because it makes copies of every photo, while picasa takes whatever photos are already on your computer and does it in that way. it is so difficult to find edited photos in iphoto because they are in a special modified folder and everything is so complicated and it was not a good invention.
YAY picasa my love!
on June 7, 2008 at 03:13 AM - LINKStill not out yet? Every time I open Aperture, I do a search on “Picasa on Mac”!!! God I can’t wait to go back to Picasa… and burn my copy of Aperture… in real fire!!
on June 11, 2008 at 10:16 AM - LINKI’m a visual artist and one of major reason why i still not boot on leopard on my mac is picassa… Please google, bring to it to MAC!!
vincent
on July 28, 2008 at 04:24 AM - LINKTruly agree with all of the above! I have just about tried every image viewing program i could find for my Mac-Mini, and non of them even comes close to Picasa. When you have some 25000 foto’s, speed is important. Even on a 1Ghz Centrino laptop it runs fast, very fast! At least 10 times faster then iPhoto on 1.8Ghz Mac-Mini and i am not exagarating.
It’s the only program i miss badly after the switch from XP. Otherwise no complaints, only positive remarks about the switch from XP.
Hurry Google!
DutchT
on August 2, 2008 at 07:55 AM - LINKI am encouraged to see so many echoing my experience. When we made the switch to Mac a few years ago, I was thrilled by the change in OS, except for one application: IPHOTO! Compared to picasa, it was truly difficult to work with and has an awful and confusing workflow. I am eagerly waiting for Picasa for Mac. Apple may be worried about this eating into their profits, but the result will be interesting for us. When picasa is finally introduced for the mac, we can finally get rid of the home windows machine, who’s only purpose is to manage photos in Picasa!!
on August 6, 2008 at 09:13 AM - LINKI would love to see this. The thing for me is that I don’t really use the editing tools in either Picassa or iPhoto. On a PC I find it most convenient usually to just view my photos straight from explorer, because the picture and fax viewer allows you to scroll through the entire folder. On a Mac however (which otherwise I love), viewing images through the finder is a pain. Preview only allows you to view the image you’ve clicked on, so to scroll through a folder you have to select every image.
I think iPhoto has some good features, and it is very nice for viewing photos, but I don’t want to deal with its library. I love how Picassa for windows simply ‘watches’ your pictures folder and automatically updates the program with new photos while leaving your file and folder system intact. I also love Picassa’s backup feature, because it remembers which photos you have already backed up.
I may be in a minority since I don’t use either of these programs for their editing capabilities, but I prefer to just do that myself in Photoshop.
on August 26, 2008 at 11:45 AM - LINKOh, yes i fully agree, and it took my some time to find the way to select all photos in a folder and open in preview, then it works
(of course it also is easy to install phoenix slides)
I just installed picasa inside crossover mac, and it works nicely except for full-screen viewing, but i like being able to sort and edit in the extremely fast way - i will see if it is worth the 40$ for crossover
Now i just got a sigma, that makes raw files that no program seems to understand but its own, so i am again stuck with the dilemma of how to store&edit;photos…
on August 26, 2008 at 01:39 PM - LINKWith over 30,000 pictures, I really don’t have space for iPhoto to make copies of each one. After less than a week of using iPhoto, I just gave up on it. It’s *very* slow, duplicates pictures, requires me to go find and import pictures each time I add them to my computer and is just plain awkward. Picasa has none of those downsides, and has lots of upsides.
Picasa for Mac!
on September 2, 2008 at 06:06 PM - LINKPicasa can run in CrossOver Mac!!!
Thus for $40 http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/ PIcasa really works superfast with only certain limitations: no full screen, only gmail for sending pictures and takes a minute to start
Finally i can edit and save all my pictures, email and use webabums, it is really a pleasure, and amazing that is works so transparently!
For seeing full screen and rotating pictures i use the free phoenix slides
on September 2, 2008 at 06:57 PM - LINKThanks for the tip about Crossover.
on September 7, 2008 at 05:02 PM - LINKI got a copy and it seems to work nicely. Every once in a while I get
some weirdness happening with my stylus but for the most part its
great.
Much more convenient than using Parallels and I can use CS3 on my Mac as an Editor.
Clearly we need Picasa for Mac!
How do we make Google listen? I tried to find a reasonable Google contact email adress to submit my lobby to without success ... hope Google is following this thread and if so: Please confirm when it will be there!!
on October 13, 2008 at 03:17 PM - LINK