I’m thinking of switching from iPhoto to Picasa for my photo management, but I’m wondering what I lose as far as inter-functionality with Lion Mail, Address Book and possibly even iCal.
Thanks!
—–
Tom Abbott
10 Responses to “What Do I Lose If I Switch To Picasa and Stop Using iPhoto?”
Leave a Comment Related to "What Do I Lose If I Switch To Picasa and Stop Using iPhoto?"
Sign up for our new daily email digest of forum topics!
Connect With MacMost
Subscribe at iTunes to the MacMost video podcast
Check out the free MacMost weekly email newsletter
Become a fan of MacMost on Facebook
Get Updates, News and Tips on Twitter
Get the Free MacMost App for the iPhone and iPod Touch
I’ve never thought of Picasa as a replacement for iPhoto. Picasa, to me, is a competitor to Flickr — an online gallery of your favorite photos.
I’m not that familiar with the Picasa desktop client, but I imagine it isn’t as feature-packed as iPhoto (Faces, Places, editing, tagging, etc.).
But I’m sure you would lose a lot of functionality between apps. In addition to the ones you mention, I’m sure it doesn’t sync your photos with other devices (iPad, iPhone, iPods). And then there is the ability to easily grab photos from iPhoto in the Finder, iMovie and other applications.
Thanks Gary. My iPhoto library keeps getting corrupted and I have to recreate it. This has happened twice now in two months. When I recreate my library I lose all of the additional info such as events and faces. The Picasa desktop client is actually very robust. I would use both so as not to lose the iPhoto inter-functionality, but I noticed that when I modify a photo in Picasa it has to make a new copy of the original since iPhoto has a hold of it.
Anyway, I haven’t thrown in the towel just yet on iPhoto.
Recreate it? Why not just restore your iPhoto library from your Time Machine backup if it gets corrupted? Quick and simple.
Of course it should never get corrupted. But things happen. Perhaps your hard drive is slightly faulty? All the more reason to make sure you are using Time Machine.
I still need to go buy an external hard drive for Time Machine. The budget is a bit tight right now so this will have to wait. So right now Time Machine isn’t getting used.
I wouldn’t go a minute without it. USB hard drives are cheap. You can get them for $40 to $100 (for a huge one). And photos are often the most valuable thing we keep on our computers. Can you imagine if your hard drive crashed right now and you lost all of the photos on your computer?
Do you have a particular brand and/or model you can recommend for an external hard drive?
No specific recommendations. Look at reviews on online sites.
What are the steps to restore the iPhoto library from Time Machine?
If you want to restore the entire thing in one shot, then just go to your Picture folder, launch Time Machine, and restore the entire iPhoto “package” from an earlier hour/day.
I use Both, the desktop version of Picasa is wonderful. As Gary indicated, you can’t import photos from Picasa to say iMovie. But Picasa is faster, has faces, does it better than iPhoto, has places, tagging, the ability to create simple HTML or XML outputs with thumbnails and and a few editing features that iPhoto doesn’t have. The collage feature is one of the best around. It plays nicely with iPhoto, sees the iPhoto library as read only and asks if you want to copy a file to edit outside iPhoto.
So like most software choices you don’t have to use one or the other, you can use both and in fact get more productivity in doing so.