Picasa 2 vs iPhoto 5
3,263 wordsOK, it’s nearly time for the hartnup.net Macintosh 2005 judgement, but before I look at the whole, I can’t resist getting a little bit more specific, and talking about one application: iPhoto, and its primary Windows competition, Picasa 2.
(Quick fill-in for those who can’t keep up: iPhoto is a photo management application for Macs, which is part of Apple’s iLife package. iLife costs £49 to buy, but it comes bundled with Macs and you can reasonably expect most Mac users to have it. For the record, we’re talking about the newest version, from iLife ‘05. Picasa 2 is also a photo management application, but this time for PCs. Picasa (the company) was bought by Google, and Picasa 2 (the application) is a free download — the only catch being that some services affiliated to Google are hard-wired into the application).
Although the original Picasa passed me by, the Google brand led me to download version 2 when it was released in February, and I was mightily impressed. At the time I wrote:
“Is it better than iPhoto? I’ve no idea. I’ve never used iPhoto. However, I can say that if someone applied the same design values to an MP3 library application (and provided iPod integration), I would drop iTunes in a snap.”
Ironically, Picasa is one of the reasons I caved in to the tempation to experiment with a Mac. For the last ten years, the applications I’ve used have mostly been open source applications which are very featureful, very functional, but somewhat utilitarian. Now, I mean utilitarian in a good way — no silly distractions to get in the way — but Picasa opened my eyes to what a commercially polished end-user oriented application could be. Picasa has a prettiness that few open source programmers would bother with, yet none of that gets in the way of its incredibly fluid and intuitive user interface.
This is the stuff that Mac OS is famous for. Indeed, Gav said to me, “If you like Picasa, you’ll love the Mac”. So, having not been interested in unnecessarily cute GUIs for years, I was suddenly primed for the Mac OS experience. Plus of course, that Mac Mini form factor is so cute. Everyone who’s seen one agrees.
Without further ado then, let’s answer that question I posed in February. Is Picasa 2 better than iPhoto? The answer is yes. Not only is Picasa 2 a better photo organiser than iPhoto, it is (for Apple) embarrassingly so. Picasa is so clearly leaps and bounds ahead of iPhoto in terms of usefulness and fluency of operation that I find it difficult to understand how there is any question on the matter. But there is: Google for opinions and you’ll find that my opinion is by no means universal.
So, I’d better back up my opinion.
Before we start, since we’ll be talking partly about performance, I should state what machines I’ve used these applications on.
I run iPhoto on the Mac Mini: 1GB RAM, 1.42GHz CPU
I run Picasa on my work laptop: 512MB RAM, 1.8GHz CPU
Note that the difference in CPU architectures should mean the Mac’s 1.42GHz outperforms the PC’s 1.8GHz.
The majority of my photos are 5 megapixel JPEGs. This has a bearing on performance too.
Also before we start, it’s probably best that I state what I think a photo organising application ought to do. I should point out that before Picasa, I stored my photos in a hierarchy of directories, and browsed them using Windows Explorer — in other words I didn’t have a photo organiser. To some extent Picasa therefore coloured my expectations of what a photo organiser should do.
I believe a photo organiser should allow me to:
- Comment/label pictures in a convenient manner
- Place pictures in named groups; one photo may be more than one group
- Import pictures from a digital camera
- Search for pictures/groups using text patterns
- Browse thumbnails of various sizes
- View individual images; zoom, pan etc.
- Crop pictures, adjust colour/contrast/etc. — tricky to guage how many image editing functions is too few, and how many is too many.
- Full-screen slideshows
Both iPhoto and Picasa do all of the above. The issue is, how easy do they make it?
Labelling/Commenting
In Picasa, if you’re viewing a single picture, adding a caption is a zero-click operation. Just start typing, and your caption appears beneath the image. This means that to caption a set of pictures, all you have to do is open the first one, then type, enter, arrow right, until you’ve finished. There is an unfortunate inability to move the cursor within the caption (because the cursor keys are taken), and to cut & paste in this mode, but overall it means that captioning a new set of photos is a very quick and painless operation.
iPhoto can do almost the same. I had already written that it could not, but couldn’t quite believe it, so had a more thorough trawl through the help. When editing text in the Information pane, command and a square bracket moves back or forward a picture. Whether this is unguessably obscure or a common Mac idiom, I don’t know yet. Lucky I found it though, or my comments would have filled up with Apple zealots calling me an idiot (or worse).
Grouping
Picasa has two ways of grouping. The first is “Folders on disk”, and as the name suggests, maps directly to the directory in which the image file resides. The second is “Labels”. The labelling concept is shared with Google’s GMail, and as with Gmail, when you realise that labelling is a superset of sorting into folders (because while an item can only be in one folder, it can have as many labels as you like), it becomes apparent that labels do everything you need.
Adding a label to an image is a mouse-based affair, but at least it’s simple: the “Label” button is ever-present, and brings up a pull-down list of labels to select or de-select. One of the items on the pulldown is “new label”, should the label you want not exist.
iPhoto has three grouping concepts. None is related to the picture’s location on your disk: the iPhoto philosophy is that you should neither know nor care about that.
Firstly, there is the “roll”. This is the picture’s primary home; a picture may only be in one roll, and if you delete a picture from a roll, it’s in the wastebasket. A roll is created when you import a batch of pictures.
Secondly, there’s “albums”. An album is analogous to an iTunes playlist: a picture may be in multiple albums, and if you delete a picture from an album, the picture still exists: it’s just not in that album any more. Albums appear in a “source” pane on the left hand side of the window. Rolls do not appear in this pane.
Thirdly, there’s “keywords”. These are similar to Picasa’s labels. The basic method of applying keywords is to have the keywords pane open, then drag a set of thumbnails onto the keyword you want. It feels more like assigning images to a keyword than applying keywords to an image, but the end result is much the same. You can’t have the keywords pane open while looking at a single picture, so adding keywords to an image when you have it enlarged is more fiddly.
The option to add new keywords is tucked away in the preferences menu, so adding new keywords on a whim is not convenient.
Let’s get subjective: I feel that Picasa has applied Occam’s Razor to this design. Labels achieve everything, and having two ways of applying groups just makes iPhoto more confusing that in ought to be.
That iPhoto’s rolls don’t appear in the “source” pane seems strange to me — in fact you have to turn on a special view in order to see rolls at all, so I imported, deleted, and reimported my 3000 photos over and again trying to understand why iPhoto had piled them into one monolithic collection. In fact iPhoto had made each import directory a roll, but did not display rolls in its GUI by default.
Stars
I’m artificially giving these mostly unrelated features the same heading.
Again like GMail, Picasa lets you assign a “star” to items. The fun thing about the star is that it doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a star (the GMail help is clearer about this; Picasa’s help suggests that stars are for favourite items, which I feel is a misrepresentation of the concept). Really this is another grouping method: but a very simple one; either an item is starred or it is not. Because of its simplicity, it gets a convenient and accessible UI element. In both GMail and Picasa, I consider starring an item to be the equivalent of folding back the corner of a page in a paperback (only less destructively evil).
iPhoto (ike iTunes) uses a five-star rating system. That sounds five times better than Picasa’s one star, but that only really works if you assume Picasa’s star is a rating. In fact the extra compexity adds a tiny bit of UI overload to starring an item, so it becomes a chore. If you’re going to start giving your photos marks out of five, hadn’t you better rate all of them?
Import
Import is one area where Picasa’s design starts to clearly outshine iPhoto’s.
Begin an import in Picasa, and it shows you a set of thumbnails. You can exclude any of the thumbnails from the import. When you start the import, you’re prompted for a folder name and other (optional) details, then when you click “go”, the import proceeds very quickly with no further fuss.
In iPhoto, you import everything on a device, or nothing. When you start the import, the application shows you each photo as it is imported, and removes your control of the interface while it does so. This reminds me of the ridiculous (fictional) fingerprint search system in CSI, which pointlessly displays each candidate fingerprint on the screen as it attempts a match.
Search
As you might expect from Google, search in Picasa is quick and simple. Your default view contains all your pictures in a scrollable pane, grouped by label and by folder. Type into the search field, and the set of pictures shrinks as you type to contain only images which match the search term. A match could be in a wide range of picture attributes, including its filename, its caption, the folder it is in, and label names.
In practice, this usually finds the pictures you want incredibly quickly. Just like a Google search, multiple search terms are ANDed, and you can negate a term with a minus sign, so a search like “party -wedding” will do what you expect.
iPhoto has approximately the same approach, except that negated search terms don’t work. Search terms match against filenames, comments and roll names, but not album names or keywords.
You can futher limit your search results to keywords, by opening the keyword pane and toggling the various keyword buttons: these are ANDed.
Alternatively, you can limit your search to a specific year or month, using the calendar pane. The keyword pane and the calendar pane share the same position in the window, so you can’t have both open at once, and any limits you’ve selected are reset when you switch from one to the other.
To me, the iPhoto system again seems unnecessarily complicated. The user needs to know that a search won’t do them any good if they’re looking for an album. To search on a keyword and a comment, the user must interact with two different parts of the interface. Picasa “just works” in one simple text box.
When searching, Picasa’s extra search option pane fluidly swing into view. This consists of just three simple elements: a toggle to only show starred items, a toggle to only show movies, and a date range slider which goes from “all” to “newest”. Like the search, the results update uncannily quickly as you drag the date range slider.
Browsing
Listing features, photo browsing is pretty much equivalent in both products.
In both, you can view a grid of thumbnails. In both, there is a slider for thumbnail size. In both, double clicking takes you to a single image view, where you can zoom and pan.
In iPhoto, this works well. In Picasa it works exceptionally. When Picasa resizes thumbnails on the fly, the display keeps up with the user. There is no discernible lag. In iPhoto, on my hardware, this is just jerky enough to distract.
Picasa has a wonderful and innovative scroll bar in thumbnail view. It does take a little prodding and investigations to work out its various capabilities, but it turns out that using the scroll bar alone, one can:
- Cause the pane to scroll at various speeds
- Skip a page at a time
- Skip a folder at a time
In single image view, both applications zoom perfectly smoothly. To pan a zoomed image in iPhoto, scrollbars are used (which of course means that diagonal movement is not possible). In Picasa, the mouse pointer turns into a hand, with which the image is dragged around the view field. Picasa’s approach here makes the whole experience of exploring the detail in a zoomed-in picture feel more tactile and responsive.
Picasa’s zoom sliders have one killer feature that’s completely missing from iPhoto: there is a “sweet spot” halfway along the slider, on which the control will momentarily “stick” as you pass. This corresponds to the default thumbnail size in thumbnail view, or to 100% size (i.e. pixel-for-pixel) in single image view. Picasa displays the zoom percentage as you zoom. I have not found a way to obtain a pixel-for-pixel view in iPhoto, nor a way to display what level of zoom is currently applied.
When stepping through single images, both applications go out of their way to make the experience as fluid as possible, presumably by pre-loading the next few images in anticipation. This is effective, and only breaks down if you skip three or four images in quick succession. Both applications fall back on another “trick” when this happens: they display a low resolution version of the image, then update with the full-resolution version as soon thereafter as possible.
However, again Picasa does this in a manner which is less intrusive to the user. While iPhoto displays a small version of the image, with “Loading photo…” and a rotating icon beneath, Picasa fills the viewing area with a blocky version of the image, and composites the message “Refining…” onto the image while it loads in the missing pixels. I might suggest that even the “Refining…” message is a little intrusive, but this is one step further towards a seamless user experience than iPhoto.
One final thing about image browsing: Picasa has a handy shortcut to view a picture full screen: hit ctrl+alt, whether in thumbnail or single image view, and the current picture will display full screen until you release the keys. I have not found a way to display a picture full screen (other than within a slideshow) in iPhoto.
Editing
Both applications provide a range of functions for tidying up images. Neither is a paint package.
Both feature a “magic button” to automatically correct colour balance and contrast, both of which seem to work well. Picasa’s name for this, “I’m feeling lucky” is wittier than iPhoto’s “Enhance”!
On balance, I feel that the operations that are most useful to me (primarily the straighten tool) are slightly more accessible in Picasa than they are in iPhoto, but this is minor and subjective.
Picasa has two image enhancing features which I find very useful, and are absent from iPhoto.
The first is the “Neutral Color Picker” in the tuning tab. The intent of this tool is that the user clicks on an area in the picture which they believe to be a neutral colour (i.e. some shade of grey), and the application adjusts the colour balance to suit. This is incredibly clever, and very useful.
The second is graduated tinting. This is very useful indeed for overexposed skies, and fantastically well implemented — you adjust the position and gradient of the tint interactively and in real time. Picasa has a number of other effects, some more useful than others, and some of which are probably beyond the average amateur photographer.
Both applications have a sepia tool, and frankly I think that’s just giving people rope to hang themselves with.
Both applications leave the original photograph untouched, and save the edits elsewhere. Picasa does this by storing a history of edits, which it reapplies every time the image is loaded. This does not appear to slow down the user experience. Moving onto a new image after an edit is instantaneous.
iPhoto saves the changes as a new image file (behind the scenes). After editing an image, when moving on to a new image, iPhoto displays a message “Saving changes…”, and does not display the new image until it has finished. Surely this save should happen in the background, the user should not be bothered by it, and the new image should load in the meantime?
Picasa’s approach is also more frugal with disk space.
Slideshows
Naturally, both applications include a slideshow option. Picasa’s slideshow provides a quick way to view a sequence of photos, full screen, with optional music.
iPhoto’s slideshow feature is an altogether more powerful and flexible beast. Slide durations, musical accompaniment, transitions, and the infamous Ken Burns effect can be applied automatically or fine-tuned to your heart’s content. Slideshows can be exported to iMovie or iDVD.
Miscellaneous
In this section, I witter on about some of the features in both products that don’t fit anywhere else.
Picasa has a pointless but really cute full screen timeline mode, which is a pretty way to explore one’s library.
iPhoto allows you to design books: this feature is tied into services which will print the book for a price. Both applications feature the option to buy prints from affiliated companies.
Picasa interacts with some of Google’s partners and acquisitions: Hello and Blogger, for example.
It appears that iPhoto is more accessible to third-party developers: a Flickr export plugin has been written for iPhoto, but none is available for Picasa (presumably, since Google does not own Flickr, this is undesirable for them).
I have scratched the surface: both applications have many other features.
Conclusion
At the start of this piece — which is way longer than I intended — I said that Picasa was leaps and bounds ahead of iPhoto, and yet in most of my sections, Picasa’s superiority over iPhoto has been slight: so how can I justify that claim?
The fact is that all of these little things add up. Where Picasa works the same way as iPhoto, it does so with a little more sheen. There are no rough edges. Where some operations in iPhoto take a few clicks in unexpected places, in Picasa they are almost always conveniently close to where you’re currently working.
I don’t know what tricks Picasa uses to give such a responsive user experience: at a guess, it’s doing a lot of threading, preloading and cacheing, and where possible it’s using the graphics card’s capabilities for scaling, rotation etc. iPhoto does some of this, but apparently not in quite as many places, with the result that it often seems a lot less responsive than Picasa. It will be interesting to see whether Apple’s new Core Image technology will improve matters (I gather this may not help in any case, on a Mac Mini).
One gets the impression that Apple was constrained by its own Human Interface Guidelines. Where Picasa was free to implement that innovative yet highly appropriate scrollbar, Apple really had to stick to its own standards.
As a piece of user interface design, Picasa is gleefully original, useful, attractive and function rich. iPhoto does the job, but with less flair. Picasa wins for sheer joie de vivre.
July 3rd, 2005 at 18:37
Hi,
Interresting article! I am using Picasa2 on linux. It work as well as on Windows (with WINE “Wine Is Not Emulation”). The only thing that I could not make work is internet based part (Hello, email…) and import from camera. Anyway, It is the best available photo management application under linux even though it is not open
But at least it s free.
I also have a mac and I really agree that Picasa is much better that iPhoto. I hope Google will make a Mac version soon.
Thanks!
Yannick
PS : You missed “e” at the end of the article in “joie de vivre”
July 3rd, 2005 at 19:05
Thanks for the correction: fixed!
(it used to say “joi de vivre”)
July 6th, 2005 at 05:12
Hello John,
Excellent reading on Picasa vs iPhoto. I was set to get an iBook to enjoy iPhoto but I am not so sure now that I’ve discovered Picassa.
Despite all your critics on the MacMini do you actually use and enjoy the Mac?
From your travel blog - Don’t forget to visit Japan at some point it will be deeply rewarding especially if you get a JapanRail Pass and go beyond Tokyo…
Thanks for sharing your Mac/PC Experiences…
Alex O. ( in Tokyo)
July 6th, 2005 at 13:54
Alex,
I use the Mac Mini for casual web browsing, and some experimentation with GarageBand. It’s also my primary MP3 repository. One day I’ll get around to writing about it in some detail. It’s the only running desktop in the house.
Japan — I’ve been meaning to go for years. It’s that dratted low US dollar keeps luring us back there with it’s cheapness. And yes, I’d be hoping spend some time out of Tokyo. Hokkaido looks fantastic.
July 21st, 2005 at 18:28
iPhoto’s integration with the rest of the iLife suite makes it a superior product. I also prefer the non-folder approach taken and editing tools over Picassa’s.
Great article though . . .
July 25th, 2005 at 17:15
Good and interesting comparison.
A few corrections:
First, iPhoto 5 has keyboard commands for zooming to useful sizes.
In edit mode:
‘1′ zooms to 100% size (1 screen pixel = 1 photo pixel)
‘2′ zooms in all the way, to 200%, (4 screen pixels = photo pixel)
‘0′ zooms out all the way
In organize mode:
‘1′ zooms in all the way
‘2′ zooms in to the native thumbnail size. Scrolling and such is faster at this size.
‘0′ zooms out all the way.
These shortcuts are very useful, though non-intuitive. Picasa’s sticky-slider sounds like a good idea.
Second, I’m not sure what happened with you and the search field.. It certainly does search keywords. You’re correct about it not searching album titles, which seems like a mistake.
I actually like iPhoto’s search tools following the 5.0.1 update (which fixed some OR vs AND silliness). The text search field (google like, and presumably Picasa like) works very well for most things, and the calendar is a great way to find shots based on date ranges. To find date ranges in a text-field based search, you’d have to know special syntax.
You skipped smart albums, which it appears that many iPhoto users use heavily. A ’smart album’ is a saved search - an album whose contents are calculated and which updates automatically.
August 13th, 2005 at 13:26
Loved the discussion, and learned a few things about iPhoto… but I’d like to add one pointer about keywords in iPhoto… you can “Batch Change” any number of photos (even those that are NOT next to each other, as the arrowing around might require) and choose “Comments” and slap in some keywords… either appending or replacing what’s there. Then, if you have a “smart album” defined (which is very Gmail-ish), any photos matching your smart album criteria are automatically included in that album.
I ignore the “keywords” entirely and simply use this method to organize photos. Searching the library (limiting as you type) works as you describe.
August 15th, 2005 at 17:19
Excellent article, but I have some things to add. I was never very impressed with iPhoto until I started really playing with it and using plugins. A few things:
a) I hated the keyword interface until I found Keyword Assistant (http://homepage.mac.com/kenferry/software.html). Opt+Com+K brings up the assistant and then you just type the keywords for each picture. It automatically adds new keywords, and also is integrated with Address Book to fill in names of your contacts. Now, all my photos are tagged.
b) I never rated photos either, until I read about slideshow rating. Just put all your new photos in a slideshow and you can easily rate them as they scroll by (full screen no less). This is GREAT for making a “favorite pics” smart folder that I use as my desktop background.
c) the Flickr export plugin (http://www.speirs.org/flickrexport/). I love using Flickr, and this makes things so much easier. Also, it can use your iPhoto keywords for Flickr tags. (though I admit, I have no idea if Picasa has a similar ability).
The problem with iPhoto is that you really do have to use some sort of keywords and ratings to make full use of it. But now it’s a snap to make a smart folder of “favorite pictures of dad on vacation” and export that to Flickr.
August 18th, 2005 at 07:04
Ok first I must say that I find this to be a very well put together article. However there are a few things that I would like to point out.
First it seem since you have been using Picasa, and gotten use to it interface, I think this has something to do with how you see the program over all. I happen to love Picasa, but it is not better than iPhoto at most tasks. Here are some things that you either where un clear on or just didn’t know about.
1. Tags in Picasa are not very much like keywords in iPhoto. Tags are much more like albums in iPhoto. Tags are useful for grouping photos without moving them around in the file structure. But I digress. Tags = Albums. Also Film Rolls in iPhoto are pretty much like the actual folders in Picasa. Even after import it is possible to rename the film roll or move pictures to a new film roll. So film roll = folder.
2. Picasa actually does something that iPhoto does not do and that is add ITPC keywords to pictures. Now you did not mention this and that means it probably makes no difference to you. However when dealing with a large number of pictures need to be manipulated outside either program Picasa has the advantage here. However it is kind of hard to find and batch changing is not really that obvious. In Picasa select all the images you want and then open the keywords window to add them in group or one at a time. In iPhoto keywords are drag and drop or with keyword assistant as someone mentioned above just type and it will fill in or add a new one. Anyway both programs make these pretty easily searchable.
3. Iphoto does search with “and”, “or”, and “not”. I have used picasa since version one and did not know there was a way to exclude a search stringe with a minus sign. Here it seems that neither are that intuitive and both default to “and”.
4. Timeline is not just a visual timeline. It is actually much more functional. Think of it as more a moving calendar. In iPhoto you can select a either month week or day and it will show only the photo that are within that date range. Timeline sort of does the same thing. However I find the date slider in search to be much more effective for this in Picasa.
5. Ok here is something I find very interesting about your statements about how fuild Picasa is. While I agree, it is not doing the same things as iPhoto is for the most part. iPhoto has a default size for thumbnails. As others have pointed out this is when iphoto will scroll optimally. However if you go past this it will render every thumbnail on the fly as you scroll. And it anti-aliases everything in real time too. So from a hardware standpoint, it is doing a lot more than picasa. Picasa will scale its thumbnails to 100% after that they become very distorted. This just doesn’t happen in iPhoto. But there is a performance hit for this.
6. Editing in iPhoto actually results in a changed image. But it keeps a copy of the original for you just in case you want to revert back later. It also allows you copy an image directly in the interface. In Picasa the edits you make to a photo are only applied to the photo in Picasa. If you want to be able to see the edits outside of Picasa you have to export the pictures first. Not very intuitive. It is the same way for making duplicates you must export the photos if you want to have more than one copy. So here both programs try to protect the user.
7. Slide show vs. Slide show. There are two buttons in iPHoto for making a slide show. One actually creates a editable (album like) slide show. The other does what picasa does and just plays back pictures full screen.
8. Importing. Iphoto assumes that you want to import everything that is new on a memory card. Because if you have imported things from that same card before it will only import the new images. Where as Picasa is using the file structure and just copying the files to a folder. The pictures are still show as each is imported into the database. You seem to think that iPhoto is alone here. However you are correct in pointing out Picasa will still let you work while this is going on.
9. Finally the only thing you failed to mention that would make me think Picasa has an edge over iPhoto. That is its back up utility. Which will tell you what photos are already backed up to CD/DVD. iPhoto can back up to CD/DVD but it will not tell you which photos are already backed up. This is something I really wish iPhoto could do.
10. Smart Albums or saved searches in iPhoto are very useful. There is no equivalent in Picasa. This might not seem like a big deal. But with a Smart Album anytime I add a certain keyword, rating, title, comment, …etc, it is automatically updated. So if I need to search for certain photos a lot, I don’t have to figure out the criteria and type it in every time. Think about this like bookmarks for photos. Iphoto really shines in this respect.
Overall I would give the edge to iPhoto. As feature for feature they are both pretty close. Iphoto definitely makes better slide shows and integrates well with the other iLife apps. And overall it has more features. yet it is not as hard to figure out as Picasa.
August 18th, 2005 at 19:32
Thanks everyone for the several very informative comments.
(1) I don’t think it occurred to me to try searching for keywords in the search field — it certainly works.
(2) Thanks for the keyboard shortcuts. I now see them in the help text. Looks like a thorough scan through the keyboard shortcuts list is a must when learning any Mac app.
(3) Smart albums… Like iTunes’ smart playlists, I find the concept neat, but I’ve never really managed to construct a genuinely useful one. I very seldom need to create a query so complicated that I can’t hammer it into the search field ad-hoc.
(4) I chose not to evaluate plugins, because the scope is just too great. The Flickr plugin is very good, and the fact that iPhoto has a plugin API is great too. It’s a shame Picasa doesn’t — but of course Google doesn’t want to promote Yahoo’s Flickr.
(5) Integration with the rest of iLife. This is a double-edged sword. It’s quite slick, but it does force your hand. If you want to make a slideshow in iDVD, you’d better have your photos in iPhoto.
(6) Tags and folders vs keywords and albums and rolls: I take the point, but nonetheless it seems to me that Picasa’s approach is simpler and just as powerful
(7) AND/OR/NOT in searches: I had a look around since you said it was possible, but I still can’t find a way to do it. iPhoto help doesn’t provide any syntax for these. The syntax described in “refining your searches in Help” does not work in iPhoto or in Spotlight.
(8) Picasa “hard to figure out”: I didn’t find this at all. I spent a long while staring at iPhoto in frustration not knowing how to do things (see the bit where I import all my photos three times because I’m not seeing them appear in rolls), and I don’t remember that happening with Picasa.
August 19th, 2005 at 15:31
I just spent my first vacation using Picasa to manage my photos after using iPhoto for the last year and a half. It’s hard to go back to iPhoto after using picasa, I must say. Here’s some reasons why:
1) Picasa is much faster
2) Picasa does not change the original file, just remembers the
parameters of your edits. Therefore …
3) … Picasa is much faster when looking at a new roll and making edits
4) In Picasa you can go back and make MORE changes to the image
or undo specific changes even if you restart Picasa.
All of this is very important if you’re into editing RAW images. The iPhoto RAW image editing model is completely broken:
1) A RAW image is marked as RAW by iPhoto.
2) When you first import it into iPhoto, iPhoto applies the cameras settings to that RAW image and creates a JPEG file. RAW=6Mb + JPEG=2Mb = 8Mb/image.
3) If you make initial edits to a RAW image, you are operating on the RAW image data (which is the whole point) and when you’re done it saves a new JPEG with your new parameters. This save typically takes 5 seconds on my Dual 2.5 Ghz G5. Unbearable.
4) If you make more edits later, you’re NOW operating on your JPEG file. The only way to operate on the RAW image file is to revert all your changes and start over. So if you want to increase the sharpness by 1 you need to forget all your other changes, including any cropping you might have performed!
The rest of the management features of both applications are approximately equiv., except that Picasa is just a lot faster with the same sized database. The only reason to use iPhoto over Picasa is that it’s part of iLife. But I sure hope that Apple will improve iPhoto and borrow back some of Picasa’s features and workflow ideas.
September 24th, 2005 at 00:00
Thanks for this great discussion. I still prefer Picasa to iPhoto, but your review and the comments here have helped me figure out how to get more from iPhoto. I can’t believe I spent this much time before understanding how “rolls” work in iPhoto. Thank you, thank you!
September 25th, 2005 at 06:22
Maybe I am dumb.
But, I have been moving a lot of friends away from windows.
In windows, they have a folder (in my docs) called “My Pictures”
Inside My Pictures, they have TONS of folders, each carefully titled, things such as “Christmas Vacation 02” – now, I get them to move over to mac, and there seems (and I have been told) there is no way to import these items, without loosing the folder names. (Now, I am waiting for some script geek to make an AppleScript for me, PLEASE!)
Try telling someone they have to go through 2000 folders and ‘guess’ which ones are from when, and totally duplicate their work?
Then, there is Picasa, It’s at least smart enough to just figure it out.
Also, image acquisition (through say a scanner?) I don’t believe is possible in iPhoto.
Anyway, I just had to bring up this point, this is a HUGE issue for me and a lot of other people, and it’s so silly, there is no reason when I drop a titled folder of photos into iPhoto, it can’t automatically create an album with the dropped photos in it, terrible!
October 14th, 2005 at 04:53
One thing that I really like in Picasa is the ability to watch offline folders. I have about 4gigs of photos and I refuse to put it on my harddrive. With Picasa, I can just ask the program to watch the external harddrive. That way I don’t have to waste too much space on my internal one. Pretty neat!!
And I agree with some posts here… iPhoto really sucks. I import my wallpaper folder in iPhoto and it creates way too many folders. Unacceptable!!!
October 27th, 2005 at 20:17
“Anyway, I just had to bring up this point, this is a HUGE issue for me and a lot of other people, and it’s so silly, there is no reason when I drop a titled folder of photos into iPhoto, it can’t automatically create an album with the dropped photos in it, terrible!”
It DOES make a new album with the title of the folder dropped on it.
November 19th, 2005 at 17:29
I just switched over from PC to Mac, and I’m still trying to get the most out of iPhoto. But I can already agree with your assessment. I am used to editing images with Photoshop, but discovered Picasa a few months ago and found it more than suitable for most of my needs — really a killer app as far as freeware goes. iPhoto’s editing functions are still just too primitive, more of a promise from a unreliable friend than something I can assume will be useful.
December 5th, 2005 at 06:37
I wish you would have shown us some pictures of the comparisons…
It would have been easier to see the difference… especially when comparing GUI.
December 8th, 2005 at 00:54
Picasa is a fine program (good review by the way), but when you start building mixed media movies and DVDs, iPhoto’s integration is difficult to beat. I think its a major strength of the program. Take 20 photos, 2 minutes of DV clips and build a 5 minute DVD using your mac and PC. I can do it on my XP box using Nero or DVD creator, but it is so much easer using iLife. Its that polished looking final product that seem fairly simple to build is what gets most people to look hard at Macs. Organizing and editing photos is a great thing to do, but what I really want is to take that media and do things with it (movies, slideshows, DVDs, photobooks). In particular, I think if you took 20 minutes and learn to do custom slideshows using iMovie instead of the quick and dirty in iPhoto (which you regard as superior to Picasa’s already), I think you would do that more than you think. Organization is important to me too, but ultimately its really about the final product that I will create and share.
I know the review looked only at the photo apps, but I guess I do more with my photos than “photo” things (print, email). I do print photobooks, and I still think iPhoto’s photobook creation is superior. Other than that, my primary goals are to create digital albums, slideshows, movies and DVDs. I think the last 3 Picasa can’t do nearly as well unless I get other 3rd party applications (Nero, DVD Creator, Pinnacle). iPhoto integrates with iMovie and iDVD (included). That’s major. There’s nothing like having friends over for the day, take pictures, shoot DV, organize it, edit it, and in maybe an hour from start to finish, display a DVD with intros and menus, that combines (with a drop of a menu) music from my itunes library, photos from my iPhoto library and DV from iMovie. When I demo iLife, its never iPhoto alone that surprises people. Its usually watching me click simple menus to build movies and DVDs with the photos and video I just shot in front of them that wows them. For effect, I let them do it to see how easy it is - I just tell them where to click.
My point is, I do things with my digital photos that don’t end with organizing them. I’m not sure why MS, or Adobe, or google don’t ally with Nero or DVD Creator to create something as integrated and user friendly and cheap as iLife, but that’s what it would take to get me to reconsider doing my multimedia work on my XP rigs.
January 4th, 2006 at 21:23
Picasa 2 is a very good program, especially for windows. Google has obviously learned how important UI and ease of use are and it shows in their products.
But is it better than iPhoto? Not IMO. All of the things that you knock iPhoto for can be done very easily. For instance, keywords. Select all photos you want to assign the ‘vacation’ keyword. Drag them onto the ‘vacation’ keyword in the lower-left corner. Done.
The things that I really like about Picasa are the many editing filters, the editing UI, and the ability to use a bunch of online photo shops. I’m looking forward to the next version of iPhoto which will hopefully be announced in January.
January 7th, 2006 at 18:04
I have been using a mac for almost 7 years now but have always been partial to windows based computers. I have worked with graphic designers for quite some time and they almost always use macs so I have to know about macs. Not to mention I was a mac tech for almost 7 years. I have not had the opportunity to use Picasa in some time because I got rid of my last PC 2 years ago. All I can say is this, I have spent the last year and a half looking for a MAC based program that is better than Iphoto. I have now because of hurricane Katrina quit my MAC tech job and moved back over to the PC side. I still don’t own a PC yet but have come to the conclusion that I have to because my photography library is 10,000 pictures strong and can’t afford to lose any more pictures. I have lost more pictures in Iphoto because 1. they weren’t backed up when I thought they were because Iphoto sucks at backing up( not to mention if you use the normal backup method you can only view them in Iphoto, stupid). 2. Iphoto is ridiculously slow when working with larger than life pictures. I have an 8 megapixel camera and when I scroll through pictures there is a lag from picture to picture if I move to fast. I expect this somewhat but not to this extent. I have both a MAC mini 1.42 with the internal hard drive swapped to a 7200rpm drive and max ram. I also have an older powerbook g4 867 with 1.2 gigs of ram and the drive swapped with a 10gb 5400 instead of the 4200 it came with. Both of which should increase the performance.
January 7th, 2006 at 21:35
Thanks for this excelent review. i use picasa2 for 1 day now, and i am very impressed. i never expected a program to behav this way under windows. i found some features you would probably like to know.
first there is an other way to label/categorise pics. i am using the german version, so i don’t know how it is called in the english version.
I use labels when I have to group some pics from diverent dates, into one location (eg. “winter vacation 2005″) (Buttons: “Labels”). Then you can sort your folders (for better visibility) into groups (maybe called collections?) (right click on the folder). the next propability is to use keywords, or maybe tags. This is what I like most. It is to categories pics like del.icio.us (tagging). The Tags are found in the search, so i can search for “screens” and find everything with the tag “screens”, but I didn’t need to have this somewhere in the filename, or the description.
But this Option (CTRL+K under the View-Menu) is not so nicely integrated into the gui.
The last thing I miss are PLUGINS. Pleas Google give us Plugins, there is a Plugins-Directory, so there must be something like this!
January 17th, 2006 at 21:55
iPhoto 6 addresses many of your and other’s concerms. It adds full-screen viewing, full screen editing, a more logical folder structure for the iPhoto Library folder (this is huge for some people, but this isn’t getting much hype - I suspect most people don’t root through the pictures folder, but that’s only a guess), it can handle 250,000 photos, and it is much faster, from editing to scrolling - just quicker overall. The output options were expanded (photo cards and calendars can be ordered now) and the integration was broadened to another iApp called iWeb, a template based web site creation utility (as I mentioned, its the integration with other applications that makes iPhoto superior to me). I’m curious to know if these improvements plus the insights and suggestions made earlier (above) adds to your view of iPhoto.
January 25th, 2006 at 00:50
“The first is the “Neutral Color Picker” in the tuning tab. The intent of this tool is that the user clicks on an area in the picture which they believe to be a neutral colour (i.e. some shade of grey), and the application adjusts the colour balance to suit. This is incredibly clever, and very useful.”
iPhoto has this feature as well although admittedly it is not intuitively discoverable. Another key command and one that I only found out about recently. While editing an image, hold down both the Command and Option keys and click in a neutral area. The nice thing about this as opposed to Enhance is that it affects the sliders in the Adjust palette so you can not only see what it did but also back off or correct the adjustment if it went too far.
February 2nd, 2006 at 15:22
I installed Picasa this morning and I think it’s a great app. I’ve used iView Media Pro for years on both my PC and my Macs and I love it, but Picasa does most of what I want to do and it’s faster and easier to use than iView. I’ve also use Irfanview for years and it’s great for browsing and resizing and format conversions and so forth (and the new “Load thumbs from all subfolders” option in thumbnail view makes it even more useful. As for iPhoto, all I can say is “eh”. It’s not even in the running. It’s buggy and slow and the database structure it creates is absurd. To me, iPhoto’s interface is more about being pretty than being functional.
In my opinion, Windows apps nearly always have the edge for one important reason: they’re supported. I can run just about any Windows app on the latest version of Windows without any serious problems. (On my XP box, I’m still using a DOS C compiler and an old copy of Cardfile that I pulled off a Windows 95 disk–along with the latest version of Photoshop. They all work fine). I wish I could say the same thing for my Macs. People have mentioned iPhoto 6 and how great it is. Well, I own two Macs, but I’ll never know whether it’s great or not because I’m sick of paying Apple every couple of years for a new operating system that doesn’t support many of my old apps. I own a copy of Tiger. If I install it, I’ll need to buy the newest version of Pro Tools or I won’t be able to use my Mbox with my computer anymore. Forget it. And the new Intel-based Macs run non-Intel-based Mac apps at half speed in Rosetta. Great. Forget that too.
iPhoto looks just about as nice as an application can look, but I’m not sure I care. I’m looking at the photos–not the application. Picasa beats the heck out of iPhoto.
February 2nd, 2006 at 15:32
Incidentally, readers, I have no intention of stumping up the money for iLife ‘06. I use GarageBand very lightly and I stopped using iPhoto in favour of Picasa (ironic because the reason I bought the Mac was partly for it to be my main photo archive).
So, you won’t get an iPhoto 06 review here.
February 9th, 2006 at 19:29
I “switched”, so to speak to a Mac Mini (1.42 Ghz 1GB RAM), in March 2005, used it almost exclusively. I really enjoy the quality of OS X, and the iLife suite, and lack of Virus and Spyware were the big attractors.
After about 6 months I found the cons of running iPhoto 5 and now 6.
It’s too freaking slow! I had to break up my photos by year in separate libraries, micro manage backups, too much work.
I’m back using Picasa2 on a cheap AMD 64 3200 PC. I still use my Mac for web surfing, iTunes, and email. The PC is just much faster and easier for Phtoshop work, RAW conversions, and organaizing and backup.
I do miss the plugins and tight integration you get with iPhoto, so now with iPhoto6, I am using the new feature whcih lets you import photos without actually moving the files into the iPhoto library structure. This way I can see them on my PC over the network and still have them in Picasa.
If someone ever writes a Gallery export plugin for Picasa I’m all Set!
It seems the “import and forget it” model that iTunes uses just doesn’t work as well for photos with iPhoto.
March 14th, 2006 at 00:57
Great review! I’m a big Picasa fan as well. I got my Mum to use it without any hiccups and that’s probably the strongest acid test there is.
Anyway, correcting in your review:
In your system configuration of your Mac/Laptop, your Laptop apparently has 512KB of RAM. Surely this is a typo. Picasa works well on older systems, yes- but on 512 KB of RAM! I think you meant 512 MB.
March 14th, 2006 at 00:59
Correction in my comment:
“Anyway, a correction in your review:”
March 25th, 2006 at 23:02
[…] I have been meaning to write something about Google’s Picassa photo organizer since before I started my bolg. I just ran across http://www.hartnup.net/wordpress/picasa-2-vs-iphoto/ comparing Picassa to Apple’s iPhoto 5 and wanted to link to it so …I downloaded Picassa when my sister emailed me a question about it (it’s ifficult to provide tech support for a program you have never seen). […]
April 15th, 2006 at 16:18
To Aaron: Well, there is a Picasa 2 import module for Gallery 2 - Basically it takes the web export .xml file that Picasa 2 creates and parses it for you; all you need to do is to zip the export dir from Picasa, together with the .xml file, and Gallery 2 will import it for you.
May 12th, 2006 at 10:31
HELLO
July 10th, 2006 at 06:51
Hi it seems that people still want to pretend that iphoto is better than picasa.
i am an iphoto user 1st before i even touched picasa.
although i am a windows user 1st before a mac user.
i really agree with the fact that picasa is so much easier to use.
somehow i believe iphoto users are used to it thats why they like it.
and of course they love their macs so do i.
but in this case picassa wins over iphoto.
im a fan and wish they would make a picasa for the mac.
July 17th, 2006 at 17:47
Thanks for the detailed review and additional directions on using iPhoto. I’m on a Mac Mini now and trying to work with iPhoto. I had used Picasa on a PC and really liked it. I could not figure out why I was not experiencing the same ease of use with iPhoto. The keywords approach seems odd as did the albums/folders organization. I also backed up the thousands of photos we had and of course they were not in any folder/albums on the back-up. I would switch back to Picasa if it were available on the Mac. But, I really learned a lot which I hope to use as I adjust to iPhoto.
July 22nd, 2006 at 02:00
John,
Now that I have used Picasa2 for a while, I have moved several folders and have regrouped many photos.
I would like to delete all of the pictures and folders from the library and have Picasa2 re-scan my hard drive.
I’ve done this once by uninstalling Picasa1 and then re-installing it.
Is there an easier way of doing it?
August 3rd, 2006 at 15:37
[…] Ho provato Picasa su Windows e devo ammettere che questa sorta di iPhoto offerto da Google solo agli utenti della piattaforma di Redmond, si difende molto bene. Anche perchè ultimamente si integra in un servizio che ricorda (con molte funzioni in meno) flickr, il Picasa Web Albums. […]
August 10th, 2006 at 08:29
I have windows xp and have tried to import photos from canon power shot got as far as importing and selecting folder name but whrn clicked finish they weren’t there but were in my documents. then had to copy and paste to get into picasa . I’m sure that is not the way. can you help?
August 16th, 2006 at 16:42
Someone at Versiontracker gave a very good summary of Picasa’s limitations.
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/win/34239
As someone who has used both iPhoto and Picasa, I must say that although Picasa does have some nice features (for example, multiple levels of undo since it saves edits in an Aperture-style fashion), overall I definitely find it substantially less useful than iPhoto 6. Of course, YMMV.
August 27th, 2006 at 13:19
“Picasa 2 is a very good program, especially for windows. Google has obviously learned how important UI and ease of use are and it shows in their products.”
Google bought Picasa in nearly it’s current form so Google is not really responsible for the interface. Google has not really changed the interface since they acquired it.
“For instance, keywords. Select all photos you want to assign the ‘vacation’ keyword. Drag them onto the ‘vacation’ keyword in the lower-left corner. Done.”
This is what kiils it for me with iPhoto. Keywords are stored in a proprietary database, not in the files themselves. That means they can be easily lost. I am not wasting my time making them if they are gone if I decide to move my files to a windows server. Picasa supports the IPTC standard for embedding keywords. That is a big plus for me. I wish there was a program that combines the strengths of both Picasa and iPhoto…
August 30th, 2006 at 09:34
John, a review out of my haert! I am a switcher from Pc to Mac and i am fully happy with my Mac Mini EXCEPT for iPhoto (and the missing of a Total Commander equivalent). Not that iPhoto is a bad program but mainly because of its speed (actually crawling on my 14000 photo’s). My notebook (1Ghz Centrino) runs circles around my Mac-Mini with iPhoto. Where as it looks like Picasa reacts instandly, iPhoto lets you wait for seconds or even minutes! Unbearable! Another major thing is that I organise my photo’s in folders and I want to keep it that way because I use both Pc and Mac. iPhoto does not alow me to organise them in that way. Another good thing of Picasa is the seemless integration with free Picasaweb. ( now also possible with an iPhoto plugin). Bottemline here is I end up doing my photo’s on my notebook and the rest on my Mac Mini. Lets all keep on mailing to Google and ask them to bring out a Picasa version for OSX!
November 15th, 2006 at 03:26
Great article. I switched to Mac a few months ago and agree that Apple should be embarassed at how badly Picassa trounces iPhoto. This is the hip, userfriendly artisitic machine that is supposedly so superior for, graphics, music, images and video? The one that mocks PC’s in their TV ads? Come on. iPhoto is just annoying… even the red-eye fix doesn’t work as well.
I can’t believe that Mac hasn’t just bought the Picassa technology, or sent a team over to help Google develop the Mac version. I would gladly pay for a Mac version. I can run Picasa on my windows emulator via Parallels on my intel iMac, but unfortunately, Picassa won’t recognize the photos via the “parallels shared folders” link to the Mac interface. This is unfortunate, because that would be the easiest workaround for now.
If Google could make that one little fix, I’d be satisfied until a full Mac version comes out.
Anyone using Picasa via parallels on an intel iMac etc?
December 10th, 2006 at 00:02
Picasa Web IPhoto plugin: http://picasa.google.com/web/mac_tools.html
December 17th, 2006 at 19:49
John,
a truly great review! I just moved from a PC to OSX (got to inherit my dad´s iMac G5), and I´m thrilled with OSX - besides iPhoto! I have used Picasa going on 2 years, and consider it to be the best image organizang app for me. Because of many things, but to mention a few: Easy import, speed, ease of organizing photos with albums or folders, the possiblity of batch editing many photos at the same time and also the great services provided by Picasa Web! I´m glad the Google release the iPhoto plugin - it works great to upload photo´s I´d like to share to Picasa web.
iPhoto seems to me to sluggish and inflexible when it comes to editing many photos at once. If Apple could fix these two issues, I think I could get used to it as my main photo organizing app!
Or even better, if Google could port Picasa to OSX I´d be a happy user!
Brg,
–
/Claes
January 5th, 2007 at 21:58
Has anyone tried running Picasa2 under Wine in Mac OSX? I know there is a port for Linux so maybe it would work.
http://www.winehq.com/
January 29th, 2007 at 14:55
I am a big Picasa fan and have converted many. I am in need of some help. I recently had to do a PC restore on my computer. Good news, I had all my photos on an external hard drive. Bad news, the last 8 months worth of edits were not on the hard drive. I spent $50.00 to have a data save done on the hard drive before doing the PC restore in hopes of savong those edits but now that I am ready to reload all the photos, I am not sure that the edits are there? Can you help me?
It appears as though Picasa has changed its help support. You used to be able to email them directly. I cant find that option anymore so I am hoping someone who is familiar with their program and knows more about the computer than I can help me.
Thanks
Denise
January 30th, 2007 at 16:10
Hmm. I thought the edits were saved in picasa.ini in each directory.
January 30th, 2007 at 17:53
Does that mean when they did my data save and stored all my hard drive in a folder on my external hard drive that the editted version of my pics are ther too? Is it that I just dont know how to find them?
I am waiting to reload all my photos until someone confirms that all those edits are lost.
Is there hope for my edits? How would I go about looking for them on the external harddrive?
thank you
Denise
February 1st, 2007 at 16:15
GOOD NEWS! I found all my edits. Even though I couldnt see any picasa info in the subfolders all the edits were there. When I reloaded my photos they all appeared with the edits. I am not sure how that works but I am very pleased.
I reinstalled them directly from the data save folder from the external harddrive, I did not need to use the cds for any of them. Just thought I would share. Thank you for time.
February 24th, 2007 at 23:13
I have shifted to use windows on my mac because of picasa!
Managing more than 20.000 pictures which are in named and categorized folders was just impossible on iphoto, and all editing, viewing and saving way faster and smoother in picasa (same machine!!!)
On macforums i often stumple upon features where you “just” have to know a certain keyboard shortcut… as in iphoto…
…this is quite difficult for me to remember by heart, and when i support macpeople i notice that they mostly dont know these shortcuts, which means the features actually count as nonexisting for many users.
One warning about picasa, though, if you edit without saving the photos and then move the album in explorer, the editing might get lost (if the fodlers are not watched)
All my photos reside on a external harddisk, and i sometimes use the folder selector in tools to select some backupfolders when i need certain stock - remembering to always save changes after editing, before deselecting the folders!
A really useful thing in webalbum integration is that you see which photos have been uploaded, and nice touch that it also knows which webalbums belong to picasa albums.
I do miss some quality setting like 5 stars on iphoto, and only use the picasa star for temporarely selecting photos (which is fast and convenient) - but do anyone know how to apply a star with the keyboard?
Thanks for the article and now back to my photos…
February 25th, 2007 at 08:36
[…] Blog article: Picasa 2 vs iPhoto 5 […]
April 17th, 2007 at 22:24
I need help ASAP!!! Leaving for Europe tomorrow!!
I’ve rearranged, chronologically, a family history of pictures and try to export them to my desktop. When I do they revert back to the old sequence. How can I stop that ?/ I need to burn a data cd tonight.
Can you please help me.
Thanks a million.
April 29th, 2007 at 04:44
Picasa under Parallels will find the shared folders if you map them as network drives under windows.
September 15th, 2007 at 22:57
Great article. My biggest complain about iphoto is thatit doesn’t play the movies automatically, you have to click on them and they open with Quicktime, but you don’t even know the movies exist if you’re watching the photos on full screen. Does anyone know if I can change that?
October 22nd, 2007 at 19:19
Great article. If you have reviewd more current versions of both products I would like to know. I am a Mac user (have been since ‘84) and I think your article illustrates very clearly how prior experience colors your likes and dislikes. If something doesn’t work the way you EXPECT it to work, then you tend to not like it. Having always worked on Macs, and only worked on Windows as a necessity, I find it difficult to warm up to Windows products because they don’t work the way I expect them to, based on my Mac experience.
But it is a Windows world, and being a photo instructor with a Mac lab I am always having to draw comparisons between the two platforms, not in the “this is better” sense, but “this is how it is different”. People in my classes tend to like iPhoto, and want something similar to use on their Windows machines. I I have always told them to check out Picassa, but was really not that familiar with it myself. Your article is a great resource.
But I found it interesting that the things you don’t like about iPhoto are the very things I like most about it!
I love the way iPhoto keeps all of its pictures in a single main library. I don’t care about titles because I never change them. I have never cared much about the roll feature either. Nor do I use keywords. I simply organize pictures that I want organized into albums, and I can find any picture I have taken in the past by simply scrolling through the library to the general time when the pcitures was taken The last thing I would want is for iPhoto to be tied in any way to folders I had created before I began using the program. I am perfectly happy to let iPhoto organize folders for me. Not only that, I never look at iPhoto created folders anyway, since the thumbnails work in every respect like an original image. I also love smart albums, which let me easily create albums based on year, camera type, f/stop or shutter speed, etc.
But if I was a Windows user, who already had folders filled with pictures that I had already created an organized, and I was in the habit of creating titles and labels to help sort photos, I would be more comfortable with Picassa. But as a Mac user, I organize my photos visually into albums, and the computer keeps them neatly organized by year, month, day and roll, and in the most current version, events. If I want to actually adjust or manipulate a photo, I drag it out of iPhoto into a folder (iPhoto gives me a copy of the original) and I do my work on a specific picture.
Anyway, I will be giving my students a link to your review, because you seemed to do a good job of explaining the features of each product.
February 25th, 2008 at 16:04
I installed Picasa and love it except for one thing. Windows will no longer show thumbnails in explore or when I am trying to open a picture in Photoshop. I have to know exactly what photo I am going to use rather than get to browse for the one I want. Why?
April 3rd, 2008 at 03:15
I have used Picasa since it was just Picasa and almost worshipped the program. I got Picasa 2 thinking “new and improved”. I have a problem now. My pictures are in a file labeled “My Pictures”. In the past Picasa would access any photo I wanted as the files were one and the same. What was in My Pictures was in Picasa 2. One day I discovered what I was downloading was going to My Pictures but was not available in Picasa. Being the novice that I am I don’t know how to “fix” this. Will some knowledgeable person please write to me at BoiseRobert@aol.com and help me. I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you for your time and effort.
April 3rd, 2008 at 07:26
Robert, go to “File->Add Folder to Picasa”