vincent bidaux  freelance web and application design

Switching from Windows to OS X has finally been easier that I had expected. It took me 8 months or so to forget Windows more than I was thinking it was possible. I just miss a very few things from Windows, and one of them is Picasa. I recently tried out the new 3.0 version for Windows and it’s so amazing that I started to look for informations on a possible OS X version. I remember that I was using a wine version of it under Ubuntu and it was working really great. Today I setuped a Windows Vista virtual machine with VMWare, JUST to be able to use Picasa.

So, what about an OS X version? Well, I found something interresting, this article from Techcrunch’s Duncan Riley, on January 2008.

I asked if Picasa for Mac was coming, and as luck would have it I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year.

Interresting isn’t it ? I really hope this is true, it would make my photographers life so much simple and fun. When you deal, like me, with tons of pictures files, when you use various softwares to “developp” your RAW files, when you play around with panoramics, HDR, when you send to print a lot, you really need something like Picasa to handle all this.

When I was looking for this information, I read a lot of forums and posts comments that I assume were coming from Mac users and basically saying that there is no need to bring Picasa to OS X because iPhoto already has everything you need and macuser will always prefer handling their pics in iPhoto or Aperture. Well, this must be coming from people who never tried Picasa.

Litle by litle, I am using every application given with OS X… but one: iPhoto. iPhoto is the worst ever software Apple came with. I tried many time. Just got a new computer and I tried once more: really, it’s a total nonsense software! Add one picture to it, it creates automatically three versions of it. Add two hundred pictures and your Iphoto repository wieghts more than a giga octet. On the other hand, Picasa is NEVER creating any file, and never applying modifications you’ve made to the original file. It’s all virtual, it saves your time and energy as well as room on your hard drive. I will do a side by side comparison of both softwares, maybe, but trust me, ther’s nothing to compare here.

Enough said, bring us the Picasa, Google!