Apple lets Picasa for Mac live for a day before it drops the iPhoto ‘09 bomb

January 6, 2009 | MG Siegler

Google finally launched its photo software, Picasa, for the Mac yesterday. It offered a nice alternative to Apple’s iPhoto, namely the ability to sync with a good online photo service, Picasa Web Albums. Of course, that was launched one day before the Apple keynote at Macworld. Today, Apple responded with iPhoto ‘09, which looks like it will blow the new Picasa out of the water.

While none of us have tried iPhoto ‘09 yet, Apple executive Phil Schiller’s demonstration on the stage looked great. By far the most powerful new feature to me is the ability to tag faces. Using face detection technology, Apple can find the same person across various pictures. It likely won’t work perfectly, but Schiller’s demo looked very, very good.

Even more powerful is that you can tag people in photos and sync them with Facebook. To me, that’s always been a powerful feature of Facebook’s photo service. And now that it can sync — yes sync both ways — with iPhoto, it’s even more powerful.

Another big addition to iPhoto is the ability to geotag pictures. This is my favorite feature of another photo service, Yahoo’s Flickr. iPhoto’s geotagging looks to work much the same way as it does on Flickr, but there’s one key area that’s better: You can easily type in the name of a place, and iPhoto will recognize it from a database of places. This should be easier than being forced to tag locations on a map (which you can also do in iPhoto).

As with Facebook, you can sync photos with Flickr now. Brilliant.

If you really love Picasa Web Albums, you’ll still want to use the new Picasa, but for everyone else, I have to think iPhoto ‘09 blows it out of the water. It was nice of Apple to give Google one day to live on the Mac.

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About the Author, MG Siegler

MG Siegler writes about technology trends and new media for VentureBeat, with a focus on mobile topics, social elements and key news stories. Before that, MG wrote about technology on his blog, ParisLemon. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan where he studied film. He's previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he did web development. He now lives in San Francisco.

  • Brutal. battle of the Borgs. Consumers win.
  • You are aware that the first feature you were so excited about, tagging by facial recognition, has been available in Picasa web albums for a while.
  • iPhoto 09 = expensive bullshit
    Picasa can sync to flickr and facebook thru plugins. AND tag images using facial recognition. Windows Live Photo Gallery does this as well. Picasa's launch on mac has made iPhoto's new features seem like a big fail at that price.
  • Imran: iLife 09 comes pre-installed, for free, on every new Mac. And doesn't require plugins to get functionality.
  • Mark, it might come for free on new Macs, but current Mac users will have to buy iLife 09
  • NeuroticNomad
    Imran, every software move Apple makes is to make TOMORROW'S hardware buyer cough up cash.

    Upgrades exist to keep the existing userbase from rioting. Perfect example: Snow Leopard.
  • hudis
    Whole apple keynote was one big disappointment. Yes, Picasa has many features of the "NEW" iPhoto already build in, it is free and I bet that Google will update it soon. After all Picasa for Mac is still in beta version = it will be better soon.
  • Nick
    The poser who was trying to imply that the price of iLife was the price of iPhoto was being misleading.

    For the cost of iLife you also get iMovie and GarageBand, both of which are very solid, market-leading (consumer-level) apps. That's pretty good value.

    Picasa is also a non-native app that looks horrible on the Mac and lacks the integration with other applications. (Astoundingly, if you look inside Picasa's application bundle you find .exe files!)

    Besides, with iPhoto I get access to printing, which I found of very high quality and surprisingly cheap. The latest booklets look really something.

    http://www.apple.com/ilife/guided-tours/

    And to cap it all off Picasa isn't color-managed:

    "horrifyingly, it still doesn't color manage. This makes it completely useless for photographic work. This is even worse on Macs that are calibrated at the wrong gamma by default and will impact even casual users. At least iPhoto and every Apple app in existence color manages."

    http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tp...

    So, yeah, I would say that VentureBeat is right. Picasa on the Mac just got blown out of the water after a single day.
  • Fab
    Picasa for mac adds up an easy integration with blogger, which was waited for a long long time. iPhoto '09 only has facebook & flickr, but I wanted directly to line things up in my blogger account. Now it's possible and free...
  • clf
    Picasa leaves my damn folder structure alone. I don't do all of my work on one system, or on one OS. I don't have time to deal with a software package that runs dog-slow and takes ages to import photos every time I need to use it. I also can't deal with a photo program that doesn't automatically recognize changes - new or deleted photos - again because I work on more than one system. Picasa is the ONLY choice for anyone trying to do casual management of photos cross-platform.

    When opening Picasa under Crossover was FASTER than opening iPhoto I knew Apple had dropped the ball. As a native app (actually, as an app using a highly customized WINE build, just as the Linux version does) Picasa is much, much faster than iPhoto.

    It isn't color managed? Oh the horror. If you're a professional photographer maybe you'll use Lightroom or Aperture or the like, but for the average person Picasa has an incredible feature set at an unbeatable price.

    Don't forget that "looks horrible on the Mac" is largely up to the opinion of the end user. I find it refreshing to have cross-platform consistency in a program. For that matter, Apple isn't at all concerned about making any of it's own Windows apps look like native Windows apps, is it? So why should anyone else follow suit? Besides, looking (and running) horrible on a Mac hasn't hurt MS Office as much as you'd expect, and people actually pay good money for that experience.
  • Totally agree with you!
  • A
    Picasa blows iPhoto out of the water with regard to management of photos. When I switched from PC to Mac several years ago I refused to use iPhoto after testing it. I didn't manage my photos for years until I got into photography and got Aperture.
  • Suresh
    hmmm... i have to agree with Venture Beat.

    Having Picasa on the PC and on Linux made sense back in 2004/2005 because frankly photo management was hopeless on Windows XP...

    There simply was no reason for Google to offer this on the Mac except to be antagonistic with Apple -- which doesn't bode well for the future for both these companies.

    When doing a like for like comparison i would said that iPhoto 08 and Picasa were pretty close to each other...

    But after seeing iPhoto 09 i have to say that it completely blocks the socks of anything that Microsoft or Google (Picasa) have to offer..

    The face recognition software and auto-geo tagging are brilliant... as well as the new themes that have been added for slideshows... also these can be synched back into iTunes and played on your iPhone/iTouch.

    slam.dunk. game over. Apple leads with iPhoto'09.
  • Already placed my iPhoto 09 order.... Nice updates to GarageBand and iWeb and iMovie and iDVD included as well. Not so bad for 79 bucks.
  • "CIF" has right.
    I'm totaly agree with him.

    " I don't have time to deal with a software package that runs dog-slow and takes ages to import photos every time I need to use it. I also can't deal with a photo program that doesn't automatically recognize changes, new or deleted photos."
  • Dark
    I like iPhoto 09, I dose a great job, I have 20 thousand photos and it dose slow down a bit. The Flickr sync is awesome, changes done in Flickr are automatically synced with your iPhoto and vs versa. Picasa is cool for a free app But you get what you pay for, and a ugly app at that.