Comments on: A Direct Comparison of Picasa for Mac vs. iPhoto

By: Joyce Eisen

Joyce Eisen — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 20:07:04 +0000

I just got an I mac after using a pc for years. I loved picasa and am trying to appreciate on the mac. My pictures in the web albums cannot be downloaded Help!! I want to use picasa but my movies aren’t playing.I have a collection of 7 years of pictures and movies on my pc. I would like to use them on my mac.

By: karen clarke

karen clarke — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:17:43 +0000

Considering using PICASA on Mac. Can I upload to MobileMe Gallery from PICASA?
Thank you

By: 27 Mac OSX Freeware Applications I Use and Recommend

27 Mac OSX Freeware Applications I Use and Recommend — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 06:47:58 +0000

[...] – This image organizer and editor is a free service from Google. I prefer it to iPhoto and wrote a comparison previously. The comparison is somewhat out of date from the latest versions, but might help a bit [...]

By: Vikki

Vikki — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 04:05:10 +0000

What a mess!! I downloaded Picasa, and it has made a mess of the photos from iPhoto – from some events, it only shows one photo. With others, it seems to have separated the photos into separate folders. Is there a different way to bring the photos into Picasa?

By: Vikki

Vikki — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 02:52:38 +0000

Feeling so frustrated with iphoto tonight, I googled picasa to see if I could download it to my Mac. Saw the “comparison” link and clicked on to see how the two compare. Just finished reading entire thread. People writing on here are a lot more knowledgeable than me about the software programs. While I do plan to add Picasa, I wonder if anyone could tell me why all the info I put in the “description” box (when clicking on a picture) disappeared when I merged the pictures into one event. Lots of time disappeared in one click! Anyway to retrieve the info? I thought what I wrote in the box that comes up when clicking on the i in right corner of pic would be safe and go wherever the picture went, but once merged, all boxes were empty.
Also wonder why the Key Photo changes when I add new pictures to an Event?
Appreciate any help! Thanks, V

By: Angelique Wynkoop

Angelique Wynkoop — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 04:31:24 +0000

ME in a nutshell: Mac to PC back to Mac for good now. Getting used to it again. Picasa user for a while now. Wondering if I need to migrate to iphoto (available on my new iMac). Found this lively discussion and I am now convinced to stick with Picasa. Thank you- you have helped me.
;)

By: Paolo

Paolo — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 17:42:45 +0000

I have been a happy iPhoto user for a while, until the day I decided to move my photo library to an external hard-drive, in order to free some space on the disk.

Besides the fact that loading times became five times longer, It was still allright.

Then one day the whole library disappeared. The photos were still inside the iPhoto package, but apparently the software was unable to recognize their location.

I started extracting photos from the “giant ball”, and importing them back in iPhoto. The process was painful because they were all together, since the event division of the software did not correspond to a division in folders of the phisical data.

That was until I decided to try some other solution to save time. Turned out that Picasa could solve my problem in 2 minutes.

Guess what? I think I will switch to picasa from now on, the feeling is that it is a much more transparent system. Apple made a lot of great products, but unfortunately iPhoto is not one of them.

By: shawn

shawn — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:39:07 +0000

Actually now that I re-read your entire post it’s all built under the premise that you don’t have an understanding of the iphoto container and how it stores the originals by date. I just copied my originals folder and imported it into another iphoto on my laptop in 10 minutes…no 3rd party software.

If you can undestand and work with raw photos in picasa even low tech mac users (who often don’t like to know the tech behind the scenes) can figure this out with a good tutorial…

By: shawn

shawn — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:33:56 +0000

I cannot argue all of your gripes with iphoto as I seem many benefits to picasa too…but your first statements sees created on a lack of understanding how the photos are organized in a container with structure in iphoto. Right clicking on that iphoto library will show you a nice and easy folder structure to work with.

By: Tim Miller

Tim Miller — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 06:36:07 +0000

Love all things mac but you PEGGED it with IPhoto for sure.
I’m not even done reading what you wrote.. I just cant take it! :)

Hopefully some patches are out to fix the mac issues if a problem.

Thanks for your input!!

Tim

By: helen wardrop

helen wardrop — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:08:42 +0000

My problem is everytime I scan a document Picasa takes over, I cannot find out to cut and paste this document – in which to save me lots of time and hard work, I never had this problem under Windows XP and Picasa 2.7. I only discovered it this week after downloading Picasa 3.x. Do you think this a problem with Picasa version 3? Has anyone tried reverting to Picasa 2.7 if so how?????

By: Camera Reviews: Canon Digital Rebel T1i SLR and Canon PowerShot G11

Camera Reviews: Canon Digital Rebel T1i SLR and Canon PowerShot G11 — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:50:33 +0000

[...] the file size down, RAW is MUCH, MUCH better for quality, and image editing applications like iPhoto or Picasa will handle the RAW photos with ease. Better image editing software like Photoshop elements will [...]

By: cillablue

cillablue — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:36:31 +0000

Thanks, this is a great comparison. What about Picasa & Apple’s Aperture?

By: neosheet

neosheet — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:18:52 +0000

I just trying face recognition on both stuff, i guess picasa is much better to recognize, and easier to operate it

By: Mary George

Mary George — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:51:15 +0000

I really liked your article and knew there had been some changes since you had first written it. Thank you very much. I need to know what I should do now. I have had the default “copy photos to library ” on all of this time….28,000 photos. I started on Picasa last night and love it! Except, the tree structure is very hard to read coming from the iphoto file structure. Some of my events are named and others are only dated. (I have most all my events named but they don’t show up that way in Picasa??) Also, I can’t move any photos to organize like I would want to. So! do I uncheck the “copy” default & continue or can I get all photos into Picasa & get rid of iphoto? I really want to be able to work in Picasa the Picasa way…it is easier. Here’s hoping that you are still following this thread because I really need some help here! (I also love my Mac, just not iphoto & it’s spinning beach ball!)

By: A Guy

A Guy — Thu, 20 May 2010 16:35:57 +0000

OK. Let me just say I’ve had a Mac, literally, since 1986. I love Macs. I love, generally, Apple’s software, but I will vouch, that as a “prosumer” photographer who wants untouched, original, archived versions of the 70,000 photos I have taken to be kept in their original dated folders, I readily, happily, eagerly choose Picasa.

I have always had issue with iPhoto, since version 1, mainly for the crappy way it shows small scale versions of every image when you try to “view” it (squint at it), but also for the ridiculous copying-all-my-photos default “feature.” But really, the deal breaker was my iPhone. I need iPhoto to get the pics off my iPhone and onto my Mac since it does not mount as a hard drive (like and iPod will) so iPhoto makes me choose, it will use your images folders as a “database” and view but don’t copy them (and the don’t copy “feature” diasbales/cripples the pull-imges from iPhone feature), OR copy the 70,000 images (2-3 days of time, thank you) and be run over by rampant duplicates.

Picasa is just easier… end of story. It finds/gets all my photos wherever they are and let’s me see them. Enough said.

By: John T.

John T. — Thu, 13 May 2010 12:52:16 +0000

If I am not mistaken, editing dates in Picassa changes the exif file but only changes the iPhoto database in iPhoto. There are times when you need the exif file changed but I can’t see where you can do this in iPhoto.

By: John P.

John P. — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:33:26 +0000

Yes Don, you do indeed lose that ability if you use Picasa. I would also point out that both Picasa and iPhoto have undergone significant changes since I wrote this article, so each now do things that were weaknesses when I wrote it.

It’s a tough choice but I still use Picasa when I’m not using Photoshop + Adobe Bridge. You can always grab files directly from the hard drive to drop in iMovie as an example, but I find iPhoto unintuitive and generally sucky for photo management.

John P.

By: Don Conrad

Don Conrad — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:59:06 +0000

Don’t you lose the resource sharing amongst the iLife apps if you use Picasa instead of iPhoto? I’m in the same boat – just got a Macbook Pro and have been using Picasa on my Win7 laptop and I’m not sure which to use on the Mac.

By: Charlie White

Charlie White — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:48:27 +0000

“Events” are just a different way of displaying the whole of the photo library, you can also use “Faces” which names people in your pictures, “Places” which organizes pictures on a map or you could organize photos in albums or specify criteria for smart albums. I have to admit though, Iphoto is the buggiest program on my computer and one of the few I ever need to force quit.