Any good programs like Picasa for Mac?

[hecubus]

Here's the catch if you want Picasa...you have to use workarounds? Is this acceptable or even viable to Joe Computer User who is buying their first Mac or much less their first computer? Probably not. Those are alternatives for people who know what WINE, Crossover, Parallels, etc. are.

And I'm sticking with my assessement of iPhoto, that it's a decent enough application for the average computer user (not average IT person, not average power user, not average hacker, not average geek, etc.), but someone who just wants their computer and their applications to just work out of the box.

The only issues I've had with iPhoto was performance and those were resolved with version 6.

[Lacus Odii]

Oh, I agree completely that Picasa under Crossover would not be acceptable to Joe User. I've only been using iPhoto for a little while (5 was too slow on my PPC Mac Mini) and all I was commenting on was that I was surprised that Picasa seemed a better iPhoto than iPhoto itself. I have no intense hatred of iPhoto, but no love for it either. I do feel that even version 6 just plain runs too slow for a machine with a dual core CPU.

Actually...I discovered a bit ago that Picasa does not handle editing or conversion of Canon RAW files, so there's really no point in me ditching iPhoto until Picasa supports that. Score one for iPhoto.

[hecubus]

What were the specs on your Mac Mini? When you say "runs slow", is every action slow? How many photos are in your library? I'm asking because I'm about to make the switch from my Powerbook to a MacBook Pro. I've got 3,000+ photos in my iPhoto library (until I migrate everything over to Aperture), and am just wondering what I can expect (or not expect).

Personally, I like Picasa better than iPhoto, but for lack of anything better in the PPC world or using anything non-native (i.e. WINE, emulation, translation, etc.), I'm out of choices....though Adobe Lightroom seems to show some promise, though it's more geared towards RAW workflow. Dunno if you've checke out Lightroom.

[Lacus Odii]

I had the 1.2Ghz G4 model with 512 MB of RAM. I found iPhoto's interface generally sluggish. Opening photos took a couple of seconds, and often got me the beach ball. I never imported a majority of my photos into iPhoto simply because I figured out pretty quick that I didn't want to use it.

Here's the deal though, I switched from Linux to OS X, and compared to Linux, OS X is just plain sluggish. Windows drag and resize slower, repaint slower, scrollpanes scroll WAY slower, and that stupid beach ball...I was getting interrupted with annoying frequency in Safari, many other apps such as iPhoto as well. Even the console is slower. I ended up wiping OS X and installing Gentoo Linux, and eventually giving it to my parents. My goal for getting a Mac was 1) Windows is insecure 2) OS X is Unix and 3) Many popular apps like Quicken are on Mac (this made it better than Linux, for example.) What I found was that the couple of apps I thought I needed ran faster on my Windows laptop, so I might as well run Linux on an x86 machine where at least Flash worked in Firefox. Long story short, I am not a normal switcher.

Now, I don't know if you were a Mac user before OS X, but OS9 beats the pants off OS X in general UI responsiveness. It's just "snappy". In comparison to OS9, the OS X UI is like molasses. This plus the constant beachballs that basically locked the machine until whatever it decided to do finished, sealed it's fate.

When the new Macbook Pros came out, I bought one because as an Intel box that could run Linux and Windows, I had less risk. As it stands, the OS X UI on this machine is reasonably fast, and after a month or so I have not felt a burning desire to install Windows or Linux on it. I have my complaints, it's still a little stiff, but I'm really pretty happy.

If you are switching from a Powerbook to a Macbook Pro, I think you are going to be VERY pleased. I can't tell you specifically with iPhoto and volume, because I've got gigabytes of photos from years of work stored in an intricate directory structure that I'm not letting iPhoto close to with a ten-foot pole. I've worked primarily in RAW and uncompressed TIF files only so far on this machine, and I've found flipping between pictures is not as fast as I'd like. But then, they're pretty big files compared to JPGs.

[Lt Major Burns]

512mb ram has been mentioned on these forums to a great degree to just be too little to run tiger effectively. it's just the minimum, and that's that.

it's just enough to run the os, and possibly one or two other applications, if they're not too ram hungry. This is due to Tiger having dashboard (a result of the new Core Image innards), and it's spotlight index, both things that linux doesn't burden itself with, and both ram hungry tasks.

iPhoto is large imagery, so is inherently ram-hungry. 1gb is the minimum i would say for a happy user experience of both Tiger and of iPhoto. even with this in mind, i noticed that with 1gb, it's a case of photoshop+illustrator open, or iPhoto, not both. with 2gb, both run happily.

i Find OSX on my mac to very snappy, and it's nearly 2 years old. window resizing is great, with the corner always being under the cursor. and saying that it's slower than os 9 isn't really saying much. it's hardly intensive to resize a grey oblong now is it? and i know which one i prefer: smooth, dynamic, intuitive resizing window contents. i'd like to see xp match os x drawing ability. minimise a window and watch all the icons drawing themselves back on the desktop!

[pkej]

I've been using a Mac G5 at work for a couple of years, and love it. Now we have a good offer through work and I'm thinking of buying a Mac Pro Dual Xeon for my living room.

As a long time Picasa user fearing the loss of a killer app (me and my wife use this extensively), I searched on google and found this thread.

I also searched for crossover, paralells and boot camp, and found this little thingy: http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/09/19/...allels-vmware/ "2xApplication Server" and wonder if anyone has used it at all, and what the impression is?

Since we use Picasa over the network today (and it is blazing fast) I think there is a chance that a remote application server system might be of help.

I will try it out, when the new Macs arrive (10 weeks from now, don't ask).

As for the discussion about Picasa. I've been using a lot of picture archivers in my day, FotoStation at work, ACDSee?, irfanview, and some things on Amiga I can't even remember the names of. All of them seem old skool compared to Picasa. And some have bloated until they're not very good (ACDSee anyone?).

I haven't tried out iPhoto on the Mac at work, simply because most of our archive is on a Windows server, so we use FotoStation for archiving, indexing and search.

As for storing data centrally (iPhoto style) or distributed (Picasa style) there are pros and cons. If you do a lot of ICPT searches, storing those data in a central DB makes it easier to search for data in the ICPTs. Not storing them in the header of the file in addition is not very nice. It binds you to one application for ever, and when transmitting the file (for example selling to another media outlet) valuable data might not follow the file. Not a good thing in a business situation.

ACDSee used to store all its thumbnails in a central database. When the file got larger than 2 GB, it just stopped working. Also, this file was stored in an out of the way place. If you ditched the OS (which you often have to do when working against Windows) to reinstall. Because Windows stores a lot of dirt in the documents and settings folder which frankly aren't fun to back up.

Picasa gets around these problems by sacrificing the speed of searches (though it seems very fast on our 40000+ raw archive at home).

Picasa is showing my Canon Raw files, for Windows I'd recommend RawShooter for working with raw files.

I hope Picasa will come out for Mac. There are a few applications I really can't leave behind, Picasa, Yahoo Messenger (voice and video to family on the other side of the earth is neccessary), 3D Studio Max (I'll just get boot camp for my Mac), Telio Phone (soft phone from my voip guys), games (boot camp).

But honestly, day to day work, the Mac has most of the bases covered (even a Yahoo Messenger client, doesn't do voice I read, but for the quick chats it will be okay).

I'm looking forward to the Mac. But I need Picasa to really sell it to my wife

[Lacus Odii]

Pkej, it looks like you still need a Windows Terminal Services server, which of course costs a fortune. After reading their site, I don't quite understand what this product provides over regular Terminal Services, other than it looks like it only exports the app and not the whole desktop. For about two years now I have been using Microsoft's Terminal Services client to connect to a Windows 2000 server from OS X, and the performance is great, usually as good as being there. However, pushing a lot of graphics across it will probably degrade performance.

If remotely hosting Picasa is a viable solution for you, have you considered installing Linux Picasa on a Linux box somewhere and just exporting the X display to your OS X machine? Remote X isn't as fast as Windows Terminal Services, but on a fast network it's usually pretty usable. I haven't tried this myself, but as long as it's not using OpenGL or anything weird, it should be exportable to a remote X server, like on your desktop or whatever. Or maybe this is what you meant by Picasa over the network, my assumption was that you meant files over a network share.

Agreed on ACDSee. I refuse to upgrade past version 2.4x, it's the best basic picture viewer I've ever used, and later versions are slow and bloated.

[pkej]

There are some exports for Windows desktops as well; VNC, and others which works pretty well; when I come to think of it. I also remember a Linux picture archiver, which seemed to be fast, gkview or something. It was pretty fast when I last used it in 2002 or something, when I changed jobs and ended up using Windows at my new employment.

I do have a central server at home for all the media we have. Because I tired of keeping track of filesystems, I finally caved in and converted everything into NTFS last year. Juggling too many computers and hard disks.

Thanks for the input.