Which do you prefer for photo archiving: Google's Picasa or iPhoto?

I recently bought a MacBook Pro for my wife. We have been long time Picasa users but she was excited to see how iPhoto compared.

iPhoto was a little too rigid for how my wife wanted to organize our photos, the interface wasn't as intuitive and it didn't allow her to make outright copies of photos that she wanted to edit (like for a specific project). Also when comparing side by side the facial recognition feature -- we both thought Picasa did a better job at organizing and recognizing faces. One draw back of this feature is that Picasa took a very long time to process the faces on a Mac (compared to my Windows PC). But overall Picasa is our application of choice for managing our photos.

When I bought my Mac Book Pro I tried both and my favorite was iPhoto. Lately I switched to Aperture so to answer to your question: iPhoto

I really have no use for facial recognition features. I tag my photos with more than just who is in them and I've come to love, love, love Adobe Bridge. I do pretty much all of my batch color processing in Bridge as well as it harnesses Photoshop's RAW capabilities. Assigning tags and keywords is very simple, and it keeps them organized for later tagging as well.

Creating a PDF proof of a contact sheet is literally a few clicks of the mouse. Great for reviewing and passing around.


Pretty much, I look for excuses to open Bridge up and just play. Great piece of software.

I used iPhoto for a while before Picasa was avaialble on the mac, so at this point it would be tougher for me to switch. Also, I'm a Flickr user, so I have no use for Picasa's web-based albums.

If Picasa stores the photos and album data the same way on Windows and Mac OS X, I'd say go ahead and stick with it, so that there's less info you need to recreate. But if you have to do so anyways, I'd say why not give iPhoto a try. If your hackintosh is reasonably powered, with a decent amount of RAM, iPhoto is pretty slick.

I use Acorn right now as an external editor for all of my image editing, at work and at home.

I have used both on my Mac and truthfully they work equally well. The benefit of Picassa is the synchronization up to the Google servers. The benefit of iPhoto is its integration with the other Mac apps. So, decide which of those two things is more important for you and that will make your decision. For me, the integration is the thing since I really don't use the Picassa picture hosting. Both can sync just as easily to sites like Flickr and Facebook. Both have good basic photo editing, though for much beyond the basic you will want Photoshop Elements or Picturesque.

The only other slight drawback to iPhoto is that updates are not free while Picassa's are. As subsequent versions of iLife come out you will have to pay to upgrade to the most recent version of iPhoto. Picassa will save you some money in the long run. Plus, as Apple kills the ability for Mac OS X to run on the Atom processor, you may start to hit compatibility snags.