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…
