Does Picasa spell the end for iPhoto?
Now that Picasa has finally arrived on Mac the end is surely nigh for iPhoto.
And good riddance as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never liked iPhoto, mainly because it takes so long to import photos and videos. Picasa on the other hand does it in less than half the time. In addition, what I really love about Picasa is that it makes publishing to the web a pleasure - unlike iPhoto which required the Picasa uploader plugin to upload photos from it to iPhoto.
The way iPhoto takes photo imports as an “event” and just lumps them into one big collection also irks me. As John P. points out:
I hate any sort of application that unnecessarily forces it’s users into a proprietary closed platform. And right off the bat, iPhoto does this (just like freakin iTunes!). You see, when you import photos into an iPhoto library it basically takes all of your individual pictures and lumps them into a giant ball, from which the average users can no longer extract them without great pain!
Fortunately, Picasa has included a useful “Import from iPhoto” option that allows you to liberate your photos from the greasy clutches of iPhoto.
There a few reasons why I’ll keep iPhoto on my Mac though. One is purely practical because it’s integrated with both iMovie and iDVD when it comes to adding photos to DVD edits or DVD menus. The other main reason is that I like the slideshows that iPhoto creates with a selection of different soundtracks and camera panning effects, although the music soon becomes irritating once you’ve seen a hundred slideshows. I’ll also concede that there are a few features in the new iPhoto, released as part of iLife 09 that will enhance iPhoto’s appeal such as facial recognition, GPS location for photos and integration with Facebook.
However, Picasa’s simplicity, speed and web publishing integration mean that it will take a lot more than that for iPhoto to win me back. Now if only Google made computers too…
Posted at 5:58 pm on Jan 8th
Just two points: neither iPhoto nor iTunes forces you to let it handle all the files. In both cases, you can easily check a box in the preferences that tells iPhoto/iTunes to leave the photos where they are.
While I do not see any reason for that in iTunes (who wants to manage tagged MP3s in folders nowadays?), I find it pretty useful for photos. It let’s me order my fotos in folders as I please and still use iPhoto for additional stuff.
Also, in iPhoto it’s not really hard to release the photos from “its dutches”: just drag and drop the photo to any folder and bob’s your uncle (same works in iTunes).
That’s not to say it isn’t nice Picasa has finally arrived on the Mac.
Posted at 7:17 pm on Jan 8th
Point taken Jan.
I was used to using Picasa in Windows and then obviously had to revert to iPhoto when I got a Mac and I never really liked it. In the end, I couldn’t be bothered trying to get to know it better but if I had, maybe I would have discovered some of the points you raise. In the end, I settled for just installing the Picasa uploader plugin and hoped that eventually Picasa would be released on the Mac.
Posted at 3:46 pm on Jan 9th
Actually, I had the same problem ;). But now that it has finally arrived I am also kind of reluctant to switch back again (re-tagging everything etc…). Plus, I am really looking forward to having face-recognition offline in iPhoto 09, provided it works as well as in PicasaWeb.
The thing that still really bugs me about iPhoto is performance. On my 1st Gen Macbook it’s awfully slow to start and often painfully slow.
Posted at 3:55 pm on Jan 9th
Coincidentally, I’ve just taken a look at reactions to iLife and the bad news is, the Faces feature receives a rather mixed reception:
http://en.onsoftware.com/first-reactions-to-ilife-09/
iPhoto works pretty well for me on a Macbook but I’m still switching to Picasa
Posted at 7:48 pm on Jan 23rd
One can still use photos managed by Picasa in iWhatever via drag and drop. That’s usually how I get photos into iMovie and audio into GarageBand.
Posted at 7:50 pm on Jan 23rd
I wonder, will Apple provide built-in syncing with Picasa Web Albums? Given the obvious competition with MobileMe, I doubt it.
Posted at 8:04 pm on Jan 23rd
Another thing I don’t like about iPhoto is its continued lack of support for photo-file-based EXIF editing. Comments, titles etc. should be stored in the files themselves and not some separate database. That makes archiving and restoring photos in backups maddening. That’s a big plus for Picasa.
Posted at 9:05 am on Jan 25th
Personally, I really like iPhoto and I feel that some of your criticism is unfair. E.g: having to install a plugin to upload to Picasa… well of course you do, it’s a competing service! It seems to me that your main reason for liking Picasa is that you’re already subscribed to the Picasa web service and are thus ‘locked in’ to using it.
If you’d opted for another service (like Flickr), you wouldn’t have been stuck for months waiting for Google to finally release Picasa for OS X. I’m still waiting for them to release Google Talk!!