Picasa, Google’s photo manager program, has finally been released for Mac OS X. This is absolutely great news for people like me, who despise iPhoto. iPhoto is ridiculously slow and inefficient in my experience, and (like a lot of other things on OS X) doesn’t really offer a lot of options on how behind-the-scenes organization will take place, so photos get hidden in big file trees, ending with the ‘Roll’, which is completely nondescript and unhelpful when looking for files. More recent versions of iPhoto are even worse, packing all of the photos into a single pseudofile: like a .app, it is actually a folder that has been given a file extention. This means that its still relatively easy to access your photos, but it makes actions like backing up photos or accessing them from other programs very difficult. In short, I don’t like iPhoto.
However, up until now, there haven’t really been any other options. Microsoft doesn’t really offer a built-in method of photo organization (or at least, they didn’t before Windows 7, which uses special ‘Library’ folders that can be used for photo organization, I think), so there are lots of programs out there for Windows photo organization (like Picasa). Since iPhoto is pre-installed on every Mac, nobody has really bothered to write up an alternative photo manager.
Picasa was my photo manager of choice on Windows, has traditionally been only for Windows and (infuriatingly) Linux. This has never made sense to me. Obviously, this is a very cross-platform application if it can be run on Windows and Linux, so how hard could it be to get it running on a Mac? Apparently very hard, as Picasa 3 for Mac is only in Beta at this point, and it has taken Google this long to get that far.
Anyway, the application itself is very nice. I like it a lot more than iPhoto for many reasons, but I miss some things from iPhoto. For one thing, Picasa is not really a photo manager as much as a picture manager. When you launch it, it scans your whole home folder looking for images, and displays them all, categorized by folder. It tries to sort the folders by date, but it seems to have a very tough time doing this (most of the years assigned to my folders are a year or two off, while some are dated 1990 and as far back as 1969…). I want a way to exclude folders entirely from its scan, but I have not found a way to do this yet. To make up for this lacking feature, Picasa categorizes its sources and allows you to minimize the ones you don’t want to see (for example, I have Albums, iPhoto Library, and one other specific folder opened, but the main folder hierarchies are minimized, because they add a lot of noise).
Picasa doesn’t really organize at all behind the scenes, it seems to just want to display the pictures as it finds them on your machine, and leave the organization to the user. I like this more than iPhoto, because it gives me complete control over organization and makes things a lot easier to find (inside the Pictures/Picasa folder that I made, I make a specific folder for each photo shoot, and then inside that, one folder for each camera or lens used). Picasa neatly recognizes my organizational system and displays the shoot folder as a category in the sidebar, with the folders under it.
One thing I don’t like so far is that Picasa doesn’t seem that much more efficient than iPhoto. It certainly loads faster, opening almost as soon as I launch it, while iPhoto can take up to 30 seconds to get to a usable state, and even longer to quit. However, both applications use a lot of resources on my machine, if either is running in the background my fans start going nuts before long. Picasa is, however, still only a beta, so it’s very likely that it will become better soon.
Overall, I really like Picasa, a lot more than iPhoto, and I’d recommend it to anybody who’s as fed up with iPhoto as I am.
