[bluedepth]

I recently bought a Mac Mini with the Intel Core Duo. It sits next to my big Dell desktop at home - and I do almost everything on my Mac, except for City of Heroes (a game) and Picasa.

I manage a huge pile of multimegabyte digital pictures and iPhoto wanted to duplicate all of my files turning my "organized by folder" design into junk. Picasa doesn't do that and that's why I use Picasa on my Dell. I won't use iPhoto at all because it's super-aggressive and not really configurable to allow the behavior that I prefer, using folders to organize my photos. Even with iPhoto '06 and turning the option on for it to make aliases, once it got to my Paris pictures it just bogged down, making folders of thousands of aliases - why not just behave like Picasa? It just seems like way too much work to accomplish something rather simple.

Anyhow, iPhoto is too slow, too un-configurable with an absurd amount of data duplication for the photos themselves and I would pay for Picasa, say $30. So far with the "freeware" photo utilities I've seen for the Mac, many of them are cute to sort through stuff I save from the web - but not a single one is good enough to handle my collection of digital photos.