When I switched from Windows to Mac nearly a year ago the only thing that I really missed from Windows was Picasa, Google's free photo management software. I've struggled getting iPhoto to work the way I wanted it to. I had used it for years and since I take a LOT of digital photos I have a pretty extensive photo library for a non-professional (25K photos, 55GB of disk space that span the past 8 years). Today Google released the beta version of Picasa for Mac and I immediately set about installing it and checking it out.Here are my first impressions of Picasa for Mac.
Picasa is very comparable to iPhoto in terms of functionality. It indexes all of your photos and presents them in a scalable film strip interface. You can double click on a picture and it will zoom in to it. When I first loaded up Picasa and had it index my photos it took about 25 minutes to find them all; on my dual processor Mac Pro the CPUs barely moved while this was going on. The quality of the thumbnail image in the film strip on Picasa is not nearly as good as it is in iPhoto; I haven't figured out if this is a setting, standard behavior in Picasa or simply a function of it being beta software. Here's an example:
Not long after I created this comparison image I checked it again and the Picasa version is now much clearer. Again, this may be a function of the beta or a delay in the update process for the quality of the thumbnail.
You can do many of the same photo retouching jobs that you would in iPhoto with Picasa, though the approach is a little different. In iPhoto you can see a traditional profile of levels; Picasa does not display a profile, just buttons and sliders to manage the effects.
One button that Picasa does have is the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which will auto-adjust lighting and colors and has an uncanny knack for making pictures look great quickly. In addition the Red-Eye removal tool will first make an automatic pass to try and pick out the red eyes in your photos. Though the automatic mode doesn't catch everything all the time it does a nice job with the obvious ones, making it very quick to run through lots of night shots.
Switchers Have It Easy
If you have switched from Windows to Mac and used Picasa in the past you will be immediately comfortable with Picasa on OS X. The interface is markedly similar to the Windows version, including the quirky scroll bar that Picasa uses in the main viewing area.
If you happened to copy your original photo folders from your Windows machine to your Mac then you'll be pleased to note that the Mac version recognizes your old settings (tags, stars, descriptions, etc). I kept my files in their original state, simply moving them to the large hard drive I have in my Mac Pro so it recognized everything immediately.
The reason I like the idea of having my photos stored on a separate disk and stay there is pretty simple: I share my photos with the rest of my family. So I have a 1TB data drive that has a Photo folder and within that are sub folders for the year / month-day that I took the pictures. This Photo folder is then shared on my network and my wife and kids can get to it easily if they want to grab photos and place them in Facebook, etc. Even my son, still running Windows XP, can get to them.
If you edit a file in Picasa (adjustments, red eye, etc.) the new version replaces the old version on your hard drive. A hidden folder is created under the folder where your originals are contained. This folder (labeled .picasaoriginals) contains a .picasa.ini file and the original copy of your picture. Again, this is hidden so unless you have enabled the ability to see hidden files in the Finder you will not see them.
Where the Pictures are Stored
One of my favorite features of Picasa is that while it can recognize when a camera is plugged in to it and import those pictures it will also allow you to monitor folders so that if photos are placed in them (or their sub-folders) then they will be automatically added to Picasa:
Just select the folders you want to monitor, set it to Scan Always and you don't need to worry about importing the pictures into Picasa; all you need to do is copy the pictures from your camera over and they will automatically be picked up.
Interface Oddities
There are a couple of things about the Picasa UI that take getting used to. First off, double clicking on a thumbnail pulls up a large view of the photo. If you then click and hold the mouse button it will zoom the photo to 100%. When the image is zoomed don't expect to use the scroll wheel to move around within the image like in iPhoto; in Picasa that will jump you to the next or previous image. If you want to scroll around in zoom mode you need to click and drag or use the thumbnail viewer to position the viewing area. A single click pulls you back out of zoom mode.
Even with the little zooming quirks this method is FAR superior to zooming in iPhoto; the only way you can zoom in on the current version of iPhoto is to place the photo in Edit mode.
The software is still in beta so there are problems; as an example when I tried to remove a folder from Picasa (Right Click, Remove from Picasa...) I got the spinning beachball of death and had to Force Quit Picasa. That said, having played with it for several hours I was comfortable with it pretty quickly and am looking forward to using it more in the coming days.
If you decide to give Picasa for Mac a spin note that it only runs on Intel based Macs; PPC based Macs are out of luck. The Picasa for Mac Forums are also an excellent resource for getting questions answered.
25 comments:
about the thumbnails: I think it makes a better thumbnail the first time you double click on the image.
@flo: Yep, that's what I'm finding too. Hopefully this is something that's addressed in future releases. I don't want to click on 25K photos!
I've never used Picasa before, even on windows, so this was a fresh look for me. One of my main concerns when trying out new software is LET MY DAMN iPhoto PICTURES ALONE!! And Picasa does that beautifully. It indexes your drive, does not touch your iPhoto pics. Like Dave said, if you do want to edit an image in Picasa, the program will not allow you to edit the original, thus preserving the actual iPhoto image.
One thing I did notice, and this would probably only bug laptop people, for some reason even idle Picasa uses from 15% to 30% cpu, which heats up the laptop pretty quick. iPhoto does not.
I don't have my laptop with me, I'll have to see later if there are any other things I can point out.
I heart Picasa! I just transitioned to the Mac platform myself, and also was suffering badly from Picasa withdrawal. Thankfully, those days are now finally over!
Any word whether Google will release Picasa for PPC Macs? I feel left out and would really like to have Picasa.
How hard could it really be for Google to do this?
@sgmorr: It really depends on how it was ported. Given that the UI is extremely close to the Windows version I would think they are operating on a heavily leveraged single code base. Picasa has been available for Windows for a very long time, the Linux version came out in 2006 and it then took until 2009 to release a beta of the Mac Intel version so I have to assume this is a non-trivial task. All of these existing versions of Picasa on each platform are written for Intel processors, meaning that the libraries used to build it will need to be ported to the PPC architecture.
The silence from Google on this likely means that a PPC version is not on the horizon. That's pure speculation on my part mind you but I wouldn't get your hopes up on it.
Looks like iPhoto 09 (iLife) was announced today. Late January release. I think they added some features that were only in Picasa.
My problem arose with the way iPhoto organizes. Originally I copied 7 large folders (1 year each) of photos from my Windows box to the Mac to iPhoto. Then I downloaded Picasa for Mac and said, "Yep, go ahead, fetch iPhoto". I ended up with a weird tree structure of folders and subfolders with some parts of one year misplaced into another year... and like that. Picasa done me wrong. So until I can fix its organizing tendencies, I guess I'm stuck with iPhoto. (I don't particularly want to "Export" from iPhoto to yet another copy of the copied folders.)
@APF: One thing to keep in mind with Picasa; it uses the date/time stamp in the picture, not the date/time stamp of the file. I had a situation where my wife took a rather large number of pictures with a camera who's battery had died and she never reset the date/time in it. As a result the meta data in the digital pics was set completely wrong. I didn't know this when I placed them in the folders I was using but Picasa organized them based on the date/time stamped in the meta data. At some point I'll do a bulk edit of those photos to fix them but I just haven't gotten around to it. That may be why your pics are appearing in different folders though.
When Picasa "fetches" iPhoto is it leaving the files in the iPhoto "big file" and appending to it as one edits a photo? I ask because I like Picasa better for organization and even editing, but I may want to use iPhoto for slideshows and incorporating into other iLife applications. Is there a marriage that works without duplicating a bunch of files???
@all: Google appears to have "ported" Picasa Windows via WINE (though that may just be for a viewer placed on shared CDs) which is why it's Intel only and looks and behaves like a Windows App. If so, you won't see a PPC version for that reason (and that Apple is biding its time to end PPC support).
@the_0ne: it might be building thumbnail databases in the background.
I've used it on Windows and it's great for a free app but iPhoto wins hands down for me. (I've not tried to run with a shared photo repository though. It would seem that sharing the library over the network (Prefs) might work best though that would require that the host be on. That would give a metadata advantage.)
@Pecos Bill: The challenge for me continues to be finding a photo management solution that doesn't require importing my photos into it's own library in order to be effective. Just like I would no sooner use a word processing application or text editor that insisted I place those files into their unique libraries in order to work with them, I like the distributed nature of a file based OS that allows me more flexibility in the way I work with the tools.
This is really important in a distributed environment where not everyone is running the same OS. We already have outstanding/cross platform sharing capabilities; I don't want to toss that out for the one thing I share on my network the most.
The more I play with Picasa the less I like it though. I accept that it's beta software and as a result will have some rough edges. My problem is that since switching to Mac and walking away from Windows I've come to love the UI consistency in Mac applications. One of the reasons I began to dislike Windows was the complete breakdown of UI consistency everywhere, especially from Microsoft itself. Google made almost no attempt to make Picasa a true Mac specific application, instead choosing to define a Google specific look for all platforms. I believe that is a major mistake.
My search for photo management solutions continues...
David: I basically agree with what you are looking for in a photo management app. Which ones have you found that have even gotten close to what you are looking for? I'd like to take a look.
@sgmorr: The only other photo management application I've looked at on Mac is Aperture (I have the trial). I love the mass-editing capabilities but I haven't dug in to it thoroughly enough to understand how it maintains the files.
Picasa was released for Windows just after I switched and it made me almost want to switch back!
But five years on the Mac version has been a major disappointment. It seems terribly buggy which is not normally the case in Google beta apps.
The first time it ran it was showing photos but then when I turned off some drives, everything disappeared.
Then I couldn't find any way of redoing a full scan. Eventually I discovered if you added a file, it would scan that folder and all the folders below it.
I then found adding a folder also worked but not on a drive itself, so I'd have to add every folder manually.
When I rescanned my iPhoto library, it skipped nearly all my photos, only adding AVIs and some jpegs. Only 500 of some 7000
And now I feel like I'm really going nuts because all iPhoto stuff that had come in was showing a moment ago but now they've disappeared! Aaargh!
And regards the Google forums, I posted a question about my initial problems 2 days ago and haven't had a response.
Add to all that it does have the feel of a Windows app, that unpolished feel, and I am way over Picasa.
So, like you Dave, I'm still looking for the perfect photo organizing app.
My ideal photo organizing app would let me tag, name, categorize, group and delete photos before I imported them from my camera. I find this is the time I am most likely to do that sort of necessary management. Whereas the moment they're imported the "I'll do it later" brain takes over.
@Chris: Do you move your pictures directly from your camera to your Mac or do you pull out the memory card and then transfer it from that? I use the latter method and as a result I'm used to simply moving files into the proper folder and that would be the time I would apply any attributes to the images and do my adjustments for lighting, red eye, etc.
I really want to take a look at Adobe Lightroom - hopefully it not insist on managing the files for me and just focus on mass adjustments, etc.
Dave, same process as you, except I use iPhoto to pull them off the card.But as soon as I have I tend to be too busy then to tag them.
I know that doesn't make any sense at all coz I'm saying I would tag them if I could before I import them. But that's the brain I gotta live with. If anyone wants to trade... :)
@David: I know a solution for you has woefully been lacking forever. I didn't know you still needed cross-platform. I can only think Adobe's Lightroom has a chance though I've not used it. It's one of the few apps that is light on the baggage that so many Adobe apps suffer. Alas, with the new features in iPhoto 09, I can't imagine using anything else (it's on my wish list).
I'm sorry, but I don't recall if you have tried Lightroom and a search didn't show anything. FYI, I've not.
I see your point on a portable library. If you are unable to find the perfect solution that isn't iPhoto, the only thought I had is you could remerge the library it creates using code should the need arise. (Lightroom isn't available on Ubuntu, AFAIK.)
My AppleScript skills are a tad weak but you could also use that to create folders named by keywords of aliases or symlinks that point to all the photos. Not sure if Samba translates symlinks but I doubt it does for aliases. Not sure about other metadata. Hopefully they've expanded the AppleScript portion in iPhoto 09.
@Pecos Bill: Though my cross platform needs are becoming smaller I don't like that I have to have iPhoto running and serving up the photos in order to provide sharing.
I've actually considered writing a blog post just on this topic because one of the trends I would like to see happen is for tools and utilities to get smaller and more connected to one another. Each of us uses our computers in vastly different ways for very different tasks; the smaller and more granular the tools are the more flexible they become in addressing people's needs. Rather than having a comprehensive file management, photo editing, slide show, online photo service doo-hickey, I'd like to see each of these as relatively atomic functions that could work on their own. Apple could then create an iPhoto "shell" that looks much like it does today but actually just taps into the underlying code that powers these tools.
</soapbox>
The UI is atrocious! Yuck...
@Anon: On Twitter I have compared it to a velvet Elvis painting sitting in my home. (No, I don't have a velvet Elvis painting).
Here I have this really nice UI for OS X, most of my non-Apple apps stick with the theme and then I pull up Picasa and it looks... well, you get the idea.
@David: There doesn't seem to be a perfect solution, does there?
However, I am going to be sticking with Picasa for now, as I like how it leaves my directories in place. Very convenient for sharing across my network to my other Linux and Windows machines.
One other thing I love about this is that I can use Windows Live Sync*, which also works on Macs, to sync the library on my home network to my laptop from any location. It even keeps an up to date copy of the picasa.ini file. Now when I edit something on my laptop when I'm away from the house the changes are relfected on the home server and all the machines running Picasa (on any platform) show the current edits. Same in reverse, so my laptop will reflect changes made at home. Very useful when outside of your home network!
*Of course, there are other apps you could use, such as Live Mesh, Drop Box, etc...
If you enter full screen mode in iPhoto (the third button on the bottom left side of the window), you can zoom in all you want.
With regards to the_0ne's comment i totally agree. I was migrating to Picasa for Mac from iPhoto 09 but with both apps running on my MBP 2.6ghz with 4gb ram it is really eating away at the CPU. it was constantly on 40-ish % for me. Looks like i'm gonna hold back on the migration,
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