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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.
Upgrades exist to keep the existing userbase from rioting. Perfect example: Snow Leopard.
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.
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.
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.
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."