If you're a Mac user who's considering giving iPhoto a try, and you're also a fan of sharing photos on Flickr, you might want to give FlickrImport a try. On its face, it's just a utility that imports your Flickr images into iPhoto, but there's more to this little gem than meets the eye. It preserves photo info, including EXIF and TIFF metadata.

Even better, FlickrImport works for more than just your own account. You can also use it to import photos from your contacts accounts, as long as those photos are visible to you. If you have more than one Flickr account, for some reason, you can add yourself as a contact and import from both accounts that way. One caveat: FlickrImport doesn't play nicely with Snow Leopard. To make it work, do a Get Info on the app and check the "Open with Rosetta" box.

As much as long-time Mac users love to sing the praises of Apple's iPhoto application that comes with the Mac operating system, switchers coming from Windows are often heard lamenting the loss of their beloved Picasa from the Windows world. Rumors have occasionally leaked out of Google pointing to the possible eventual release of a Mac version of Picasa. I know that I for one chose not to believe them - just so I wouldn't be disappointed if it never materialized.

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.

If you've ever wondered what the easiest way is to send photos from iPhoto to Facebook, the answer is Facebook Exporter for iPhoto.

Since Facebook is the largest photo website on the web in terms of images served, it makes sense that people would want to streamline the process of uploading photos to it as much as possible. Using Facebook Exporter for iPhoto, the process couldn't be more simple. just choose the pictures that you want to upload, optionally add an album and picture descriptions (and you can even tag people!), then press Export. You'll have to approve the photos on Facebook, but the plugin pops up a dialog with the option to go straight to your new album and do so.

You need to log the Facebook Exporter plugin in to your Facebook account before using it, and I had a little trouble logging in the first time, but once I was logged in everything was smooth sailing. I suspect I was experiencing a PEBCAK error.

If you use iPhoto, and you have a Flickr account, but you don't have a way of getting your pictures from one to the other, you might want to give FFXporter a look. It's a free iPhoto plugin that -- just as the name would indicate -- exports files from your iPhoto library to Flickr. Although there are other ways of getting this done, I have yet to find another free one that works as well.

FFXporter preserves a lot of the data that iPhoto and Flickr can both use, like keywords (tags on Flickr) and EXIF info. Since it's a plugin, you won't have to open another app to get the job done, you can upload pictures right from iPhoto. Probably the most useful feature is set support, so you can batch upload a bunch of photos at once, and add them all to the same set on Flickr.

If you're an iPhoto user and want an easy way to upload your pictures from iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums (Google Photos), then check out Google's Picasa Web Albums Exporter iPhoto plug-in. The plug-in is available as part of a package from Google's Mac tools site (if you don't use iPhoto, you can use the standalone Web Albums Uploader program to upload your pictures to your Picasa albums). Once installed, open iPhoto and either select an album or specific photos you want to upload. Then click File -> Export and choose the "Picasa Web" tab. The plug-in lets you upload the selected photos to a new album, which it will then create for you with a title and description that you can specify, or to one of your existing albums.

The plug-in makes short work of sharing your iPhoto pictures via your Google account. It even allows you to choose how to scale your photos during the upload (better quality, faster upload, actual size) which is helpful if you're on a slow Internet connection. The plug-in will also add any keywords or descriptions you've added in iPhoto to your Picasa Web Album!

Fire up Software Update, Mac OS X users, for iPhoto 7.0.2 has just been released. This update addresses "issues associated with publishing to .Mac Web Gallery, rebuilding thumbnails, and editing books. It also addresses a number of other minor issues." Thanks for clearing up those 'other minor issues', Apple.

All we know is: this better fix the renegade Spotlight "mds" process that peaks our CPUs for a few minutes every time we start iPhoto '08. There's nothin' like shiny new software draining our batteries dry to get us out of bed in the morning.

If you have a Mac with a remote (and almost all of them ship with one these days), you might have been slightly dismayed to realize that other than controlling media playback there's not a lot you can do with it. As usual, someone has solved this problem.

iRed Lite is a little utility that you can run on your Mac that will listen to commands from your remote and control other programs, like iPhoto, Keynote, PowerPoint, or basically anything else you choose. In our experience configuration can be a little finicky (we never did get the Mouse Control plugin to work properly), but overall it performs as advertised in its current beta state.

For those non-Mac using readers, today may well have been just your normal day. However for us Mac-loving folk, today saw a special event at Apple HQ. Whilst Apple unveiled some shiny new hardware, they also unveiled arguably the most long-expected software upgrade ever: the iLife '08 suite. So what's new? Well from the look of things, it's a fair bit. iPhoto and iMovie saw the most change, with iMovie apparently undergoing a substantial re-write.

iPhoto brought us a whole new set of consumer-friendly tricks, such as 'events' where instead of simply going by date you can effectively stack a number of images into one group, set a 'poster' image which represents the event, and easily 'skim' through the contents of an event, without having to expand the event's pictures within the user interface. Whilst some sites' initial reaction seemed to simply claim these as glorified albums, the implementation of events seems similar to 'stacks', a feature from Apple's professional photography application Aperture, allowing you to group photos in expandable stacks based on periods of time between shots. On top of Events, there's a far more complete set of editing tools, and the ability to easily apply a set of adjustments from one photo to another. One final, rather important feature to note was the integration with an enhanced .Mac service, allowing you to upload photos from your Mac, iPhone and even you PC to the service. Photos are then added to the online Gallery, and even sync back to the original iPhoto library the gallery came from. Apple have even provided a demo of the new gallery, which can be found here.

According to Apple chief Steve Jobs, iMovie was significantly re-written following an Apple engineer's inability to make a movie of footage within 30 minutes and the result is a significantly changed application, which not only offers enhanced editing, but also a neat media cataloguing ability, similar to the third-party iDive application. The new version is seemingly designed with quick, polished results in mind with more ways to "add polish quickly" throughout. There's even a super-handy 'Export to YouTube' option, thanks to the Google - Apple partnership.
iWeb saw yet another extension of the partnership with Google, allowing users to easily add Google Maps, Adsense and YouTube clips and more via Widgets in an iWeb page. iWeb '08 also allows the use (finally) of custom domains, and creates "enhanced photo pages" which allow you to share yet more photos via an iWeb site.

GarageBand '08 also offers you yet more tools in the digital armoury, with Magic GarageBand creating bands for you (!) by choosing a style, instruments in the band, and then allowing you to plug in your guitar or keyboard and get recording. Other tools such as the Arrangements tool (where you specify a section of a song as a chorus or verse etc) and Automation of tempo effects will undoubtbly help new users organise their next hit song better.

The $79 upgrade fee for current iLife owners seems, perhaps unusually, a very fair price for a compelling upgrade. The new version is available today, although there's a few days wait via Apple's online store.

Sharpcast, an internet file storage solution released a new software that aims at helping Mac users backup and sync their iPhoto library online. The photos can also be viewed using a mobile phone, or web browser. The Mac application that Sharpcast has developed will make it much easier for Mac users to sync up and export iPhoto albums online. Check out a sample Sharpcast album here.

Sharpcast is also rumored to be in development of other synchronization platforms for Mac and PC's that will launch in the beginning of 2007. This will include software that will deliver online backups, recovery, file sharing, and collaboration.

I'm no great lover of Microsoft, but I will say that their Channel 9 blog always has something interesting, if a bit lengthy (where's the highlights reel, guys?), to watch. Yesterday they posted another video from Robert Scoble with the developers behind Microsoft's Codename Max, an interesting photo organizing/sharing app that we've reported on before. It's interesting to look over the developers' shoulders and hear them talk frankly about the product. A beta of Max can be downloaded from Microsoft (it got an update in December, including an improved installer if you had trouble the first time around), but requires Service Pack 2.