One of my favorite programs is Google's Picasa. However, as I recently posted, I made the switch to a MacBook Pro as my primary home computer. I initially tried to use iPhoto to manage my photos as I've heard good things about it. After using it a bit, I realized that the good things I heard about it must have been from people that never used Picasa.
Picasa works so smoothly. You just point it to the directories that you store your photos in and it automatically loads them into the program for you to view, edit and organize. The program automatically displays all of your photo folders on the left hand side as your "albums". On the right side are all your thumbnails of your photos grouped by these albums. You can scroll up and down through your entire library as thumbnails You can also change the size of the thumbnails with a slider in the lower right-hand corner and watch the size change real time. All of this is done ultra-fast.
Picasa gives a number of really great enhancements for your photos. These extend beyond your typical redeye-reduction and contrast adjustment. It offers enhancements such as saturation, which intensifies the color, glow, black-and-white, sepia, blur, focal blur as well as others. They also have a "I'm Feeling Lucky" button that automatically adjusts the photo to make it look better. I would say with over half my photos, this really does make them look much cleaner and nicer looking (less washed out, more vibrant, realistic color, etc.) Below is a photo that I took and, with Picasa, increased the saturation a bit, warmified it and added some glow. I clicked the Saturation button, slid the slider to the intensity I wanted and hit Apply. I then clicked the warmify button. I then clicked the Glow button, slide the sliders to the intensity and radius that I wanted and hit Apply. It was that easy. All this while previewing the change live.
A great feature of this is that it doesn't actually change the picture file itself until you tell it to or export it. Instead it just remembers what changes you made and displays the changed picture to you within Picasa. Again, this is all ultra fast. You don't have to sit and watch it constantly apply these changes every time you access the picture. It's as if it actually is changed, but opening the picture from Windows Explorer shows that it's not actually changed. This also means that you can undo any change at any point even after you've closed Picasa, rebooted your computer, whatever. So you can undo a couple changes, make others, then undo all the changes and make a whole new batch of enhancements.
The first picture is the original. The second picture is the Picasa enhanced picture.
Personally, I think the enhanced picture is ready for the cover of a magazine.
Picasa also allows you to bulk edit your keywords. Though this feature could be improved upon some, it is nice that you can do it from the library view. I would improve it by not having it as a popup window but rather a frame somewhere within the window. I can never seem to maneuver the window to be in the best spot to bulk edit multiple groups of thumbnails. You can also search by keywords. As you type, it already starts filtering right before your eyes. And again!, it's all very, very fast.
I have a number of issues with iPhoto. The first and foremost is that you have to import your photos into its library. It doesn't just dynamically load the photos from where they are in the file sytem like Picasa does. This irritates me because I don't like having all of my pictures stored in some database file. If one file becomes corrupt, I'm ok with it because 1 out of 2000 pictures I can deal with. One file of one corrupted means I lose everything in one swipe. Yes I know that's what's backups are for, but that's beside the point. I would still have to restore my entire library just to recover that one corrupted file whereas to recover one corrupted picture in my file system is just one picture. Plus, I just don't think there is any good reason that I should have to put my files in a library. Picasa has no problem loading the pictures from where they exist in the file system. Yes this means there is a service running that constantly updates the library, but I'm willing to have a service running doing this if it makes my life easier.
iPhoto is not organized as nice as Picasa. In iPhoto, I have to specify my libraries and add the photos to it. Even when I import a folder of pictures organized into folders, iPhoto isn't smart enough to load them into libraries for me. You can view by the year they were taken. I don't find that useful whatsoever. Also, when viewing the library of thumbnails, as you scroll, it renders the thumbnails at low quality and then in the background reloads them in higher quality. This feature, which is meant to speed things up, actually slows things down a bit when trying to scroll quickly up or down. Also, when a thumbnail is scrolled off the screen, it is unloaded. So if you scroll down and back up, it has to reload the thumbnail. Now, I say slow, but honestly it's not that slow. Not Windows Explorer slow. But it definitely can not hold a candle to the speed of Picasa.
Don't get me wrong. iPhoto is a great program. But if you've used Picasa, you may find yourself preferring Picasa as I do. I debated for a while where to keep my photos, in iPhoto, in my Mac file structure or in my BootCamp partition. I've decided that I'm willing to wait for my BootCamp Parallels VM to boot just so I can use Picasa.
With that said, I tried desperately to find out if Google is planning on releasing Picasa for the Mac. Unfortunately, all I found is that Google is aware that users are asking for Picasa for the Mac and that you can get a Picasa Web uploader for iPhoto. Google, this is my plead to you, "Please, oh please! Make a Mac version of Picasa." Until then, all I can hope is that the next version of iPhoto in Mac OS X Leopard has greatly improved.
Tags: Google, Picasa, iPhoto, Apple
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