Saturday, June 23, 2007

Switching to Mac Day 2 Part 2: iPhoto

After transferring my iTunes library, now is the turn for my pictures. On Windows, I use and love Google's Picasa. Its integration with the Picasa web album is superb. On the Mac, there's iPhoto. Alas, Google doesn't make Picasa for Mac, but they do provide a Picasa web album plug-in for iPhoto, so I can simply export pictures to my Picasa web album.

Backing up pictures from Picasa is very easy. Although by default it is set to backup to optical media, you can reconfigure the backup tool to do a backup to any folder (networked drive, external drive, etc). Simply select the albums you want to backup.

Importing to iPhoto is as easy as importing Picasa's backup folder. Unfortunately, all my editing and enhancements from Picasa are lost, so I would have to review my photo library one of these days and re-do any enhancements using iPhoto. :(

Apparently iPhoto can handle videos too. I have some videos taken by my digicam in my Picasa library, and iPhoto transferred them just fine. Unlike Picasa, playback of videos in iPhoto is handled by Quicktime.

On Picasa, I'm used to have my library setup by folders. With iPhoto, each folder becomes a roll. Problem is, the rolls are not listed in the library sidebar. Definitely something that I have to adjust to. Another point for Picasa, looks like iPhoto doesn't have a built-in backup feature. Ability to do full-screen editing is nice, but I already miss Picasa's features. Picasa's "I'm feeling Lucky" button seems to do a better job than iPhoto's "Enhance" feature. Also I can quickly pick and set a neutral color and do auto brightness/contrast/lightning on Picasa, while everything is manual in iPhoto. Picasa is just so superb (when I first use Picasa, I though it was made by Apple as iPhoto for windows) that it is definitely going to be missed. Again, with Google and Apple being buddies, I hope the best of both will come in the next version of iPhoto, or maybe Picasa for Mac.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey, ran across a link for your blog in the Mac Forums. I just received my Macbook Pro two days ago so I'll be following along with you! Just an hour ago I discovered the two finger scroll on the touchpad... AMAZING! I love how every hour or so I play with it I find some new cool feature!

Mikie said...

iPhoto definitely needs an update-- there has yet to be a new iLife package released in 07-- hopefully iPhoto can come closer to Picasa.