Filed under: Photo, Video, Macintosh, Productivity, Google, Freeware
Picasa for Mac beta finally arrives
by Jason Clarke Jan 6th 2009 at 11:00AM
Well, for those people wishing for the Picasa experience on their Mac, today is a glorious day. Today Google released a beta version of Picasa for the Mac, and in typical Google fashion this beta release is solid enough for widespread use. I suppose I should insert a joke about how every Google product stays in beta for years, but I'm sure you can think of one funnier than whatever I might come up with. Or maybe you're just as tired as I am of that particular Google jab?
To try it out, download the beta from here.
By default, Picasa will index any images on your Desktop, in your Pictures folder, and all of your iPhoto library. For 90% of users, this default will be exactly what they are looking for. A single click to accept the default is all that is needed for Picasa to spring into action, furiously indexing all of the photos on your computer. Picasa's indexing is surprisingly fast, and though I have not done any side-by-side testing, it certainly feels faster than Picasa on Windows when it comes to indexing photos.
In fact, Picasa feels blazingly fast no matter what you are doing with it. Google proudly proclaims that Picasa can handle huge photo libraries with ease, and given how handily it dealt with my photo library, I'm inclined to believe them.
Anyone that has used Picasa in Windows will feel right at home in the Mac version, as it is a very faithful clone of the original Windows version. While that is wonderful for continuity's sake, it's also my only current knock against the product; in making it feel so much like its Windows counterpart, it just doesn't feel nearly as Mac like as it could have. For an example of a companies that are doing products for the Windows and Mac operating systems well, check out Evernote's Mac and Windows products, and NewsGator's NetNewsWire (Mac) & FeedDemon (Windows) combination. Both companies have feature parity for both platforms (at least as far as core features are concerned), and yet each product feels right at home in its operating system.
The fact that Picasa on the Mac performs so quickly certainly takes the edge off of that complaint, however, since the most common problem with software that is ported to another platform is typically poor performance.
For some examples of why you might want to consider Picasa as either a replacement for iPhoto, or at least an adjunct to it, check out the demonstration video embedded on the Picasa announcement post on the Google blog.
Note that when word first came out that Picasa had been released for the Mac, the download link incorrectly pointed to the Picasa Web Album Uploader product. The link has subsequently been fixed, so if you are attempting to download Picasa and keep getting the album uploader, try clearing your browser's cache, then try again.