Any good programs like Picasa for Mac?

I have it installed but I don't have tons of pics loaded in it yet. I did not use 05. Perhaps I will load all my pics in this weekend.

roger
 
If you just want a down-and-dirty viewer/sorting program, try free beta of Adobe Lightroom, download from Adobe.com or MacUpdate.
 
or rather: don't do that. it's only the beta that's free. once the product goes final, it should compete with Apple's Aperture - and might cost like the professional software it's supposed to be! So: Rather try _not_ locking yourself in.

I'd say iPhoto '06 - with its option to not tamper with your file/folder structure - is worth another try.

Another thing: Since iPhoto _does_ have good management with meta-data, it should basically never be a big problem to switch to _another_ good program that handles meta-data. So *I*'d just let iPhoto handle the stuff the way it wants to. You don't really have to look at the folder structure, since _iPhoto_ should be the way to look at the photos.
 
Macworld's review indicates they found iPhoto from iLife '06 _is_ significantly faster.

I still haven't tried Picassa. I'm sure it's going to be VERY slow.


But only because I'm running it in VirtualPC. :)

Doug
 
Actually, I finally got to play around with Picasa when I installed it for a coworker at the school site I work at. It's actually not that bad and it performs quite well. I think it's a good option if you're looking for something like iPhoto in the PC world. As for the Mac, I still would recommend iPhoto. :D
 
i installed Picassa for my families pc. it's bloody amazing. it's lightning fast, and has lots of really nice elegant effects (rotating an image, for example, the photo rotates animatedly, it's really nice, and not at all distracting), the filters to add to photo's are also really powerful, and real-time. a good one to play with is soft-focus, it gives you a blur which gradually gets more blurry from the centre-point out, with the centre point being clear. you put that on someones head to look really bloody good, and you can just drag it around the photo as it instantly blurs in varying levels... scrubbing through 2000 photo's was a lot faster, and a lot smoother than my iphoto (i run dual 1.8ghz G5 with 2gb ram and a 128mb Radeon, they run a 1.6ghz P4 dell thing with 768mb ram).

Picassa is very impressive stuff.
 
I;'m not too familair with Picassa, you might like Kavasoft's Shoebox app. It's not too bad, but it's kinda slow (about as fast as iPhoto), and for the features it does have $29 is a bit steep.

I'm an ACDSee fan (Mac version no longer supported, I guess). Shoebox is the only app I found that you can use "categories" with, which I sorely need. I draw as a hobby, and keep thousands (85,000+) of photo references. It's so much easier just keeping them in little "albums". iPhoto is ok for photos if you got small collections, and photos for keepsake memories and that jazz; ultimately reasons seemingly the exact opposite of mine. I collect drawings, paintings, animated GIF's, etc. I keep 'em just for reference, not (usually) to enjoy, but I do downloads lotsa good photography stuff now and then.

I just use finder. I just wish Finder could display more info in thumbnail mode besides just the dimensions (?).

Good luck, I wish I could help other than trying Shoebox. I'll keep posted to this thread though, I've been looking for something now for almost a year. Nothing. I love my Mac Mini but geez, why do diffcult to find a good media browser app?
 
i too have been looking for a picasa equivalent on the mac and haven't come across it yet. i'm trying out iphoto 6, but iphoto 5 was just horrible compared to picasa, so i'm not getting my hopes up. i have about 4K photos on a 1.42Ghz mac mini with 1GB of ram, and it's a tad bit slow.
 
ditto on reasons for bringing picasa to the mac.

I just recently switched to a mac, and while I love everything about it, iphoto is lacking. Some can argue that it may in fact be "more powerful" and such, but picasa just has too many other advantages.

It's faster hands down. I've got less photos in iphoto then I had on my other laptop (the laptop crashed, so I lost many of them), and iphoto is just too slow. It's not the computer either - this the latest G4 powerbook (before the intel changes) and is at least 2x what my previous laptop was. (Yes, I've done all the actual research on processor comparisons too.)

Keyword and search system was far superior. I've used countless scripts in iphoto, and they still cannot compete with the simplicity of picasa in this area - picasa didn't need scripts to attempt competition with iphoto.

Storage system. I see very few advantages to iphotos storage system. While it is nice that I only need to worry about the keywords, or "album" labels in iphoto, it's one royal pain in the rear to easily access the files if I wanted to send a group of them to someone else (or do ANYTHING with them for that matter), WITHOUT any exporting. Also, I've never had more problems with duplicate photos EVER. I've used scripts to eliminate, iphotodiet, and several others. I shouldn't need to use them! iphoto should be intelligent enough!

PLEASE - GOOGLE HEAR OUR PLEA, OR SOMEONE WITH THE CODING ABILITY PORT THIS OVER FOR US!
 
I just bought the imac 20" with the intel duo core. I am a long...long...long time windows user. I had been working with picassa with around 7,000 photos. It is extremely fast and the editing features are easy to use. Also, i love the built-in blogger function. iPhoto has been fine but is slow...it seems to really have a hard time with the large number of photos. I had always heard macs were fast and designed to work with graphics and video...i'm just not seeing it yet. I too hope that google will build a version of picassa for the mac.
 
So for those of us who really want picasa onto OSX how can we make it happen? There is a google group that wants it to happen too. I'm no coder - so how do we get one, or can we?
 
dbrsystems said:
I just bought the imac 20" with the intel duo core. I am a long...long...long time windows user. I had been working with picassa with around 7,000 photos. It is extremely fast and the editing features are easy to use. Also, i love the built-in blogger function. iPhoto has been fine but is slow...it seems to really have a hard time with the large number of photos. I had always heard macs were fast and designed to work with graphics and video...i'm just not seeing it yet. I too hope that google will build a version of picassa for the mac.

iPhoto, according to a lot of the people here who use it often, tends to be quite slow in general no matter what the CPU. I played with it a little bit but personally I didn't notice that much of a slowdown. Of course, I didn't import a gazillion pictures into it so I don't really know how bad the slowdown is.

I have finally had the opportunity to use Picasa for more than a few minutes and it's actually very good. I think choice is great and I do hope that Google would make it available for Mac users. They've already made it available to Linux users, but I don't like how they did this (through WINE). Hopefully they can produce a native version for Linux as well as the Mac soon.
 
I know little about coding - but, if they have put it out for linux, isn't there some way for us to port it to OS X? The kernel is the same isn't it? They both run off Unix?
 
sfenton83 said:
I know little about coding - but, if they have put it out for linux, isn't there some way for us to port it to OS X? The kernel is the same isn't it? They both run off Unix?

As I mentioned in my post, they have it for Linux but through WINE, so it's basically the Windows version running through WINE, which means it's not native. The other thing is that they would have to port it over to run natively on OS X, and no one is goign to want to run a Mac application under X11 (check ouit OpenOffice for the Mac and you'll see what I mean). They want it to look and function like all their other Mac apps: seemlessly and simply, as a Mac app should be.
 
Does iPhoto come with Tiger?

nixgeeek said:
and no one is goign to want to run a Mac application under X11 (check ouit OpenOffice for the Mac and you'll see what I mean).
I certainly would! But then again, I'm not really a Mac user. :D

wajacksonmd said:
Before iPhoto I used iView MediaPro. It can handle a lot of file types.
iView looks neat. Too bad it costs so much. :(

Peace...
 
dktrickey said:
...I haven't used Picassa (yet -- but I'm downloading it to try on my Power Mac.)...


Thats the problem. It's not for Mac. And yes, although iPhoto is a nice app overall, it is Ridiculously slow.
 
sfenton83 said:
So for those of us who really want picasa onto OSX how can we make it happen? There is a google group that wants it to happen too. I'm no coder - so how do we get one, or can we?

Count me in too.
 
Stridder44 said:
Thats the problem. It's not for Mac. And yes, although iPhoto is a nice app overall, it is Ridiculously slow.

It is pretty slow, but scrolling is improved greatly in iPhoto 6. Is there any way to have the organization system like it is in picasa? Everything is in one, giant library in iPhoto. I don't know what photos are organized and what are not.. it's annoying. If they had picasa for mac, I would get it. Defiantly one of the best photo library tools.
 
tomdkat said:
Does iPhoto come with Tiger?

It comes with iLife '06 which comes installed on new macs, as does Tiger.

if you buy the boxed version of Tiger to upgrade your mac, then that doesn't come with any iLife apps.
 
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