Earlier today we drew your attention to the release of Picasa for the Mac, well now Apple has made the next move and it hasn’t waited around, they’ve released iLife 09 with a variety of spanking new features.
The three most unique being:
Faces. An intriguing addition to the application allowing you to organise your photo collection by the people in the photos! Although not perfect, it’s far better than even I could have expected on viewing the demo.
Places. A way to instantly view your photos based on where they were taken. Thanks to built-in GPS and ironically Google maps, iPhoto translates the latitude and longitude into recognisable places.
Facebook Integration. iPhoto integrates with Facebook allowing you to tag the people in your photos with your friends names from Facebook. Definitely something i’m looking forward to incorporating.
Other new features worth mentioning include;
i) iPhoto has brand new slideshow themes bringing life to your photos and the slideshows can then be saved onto your iPhone or touch!
ii) Smart folders to organise your photos as you wish.
I have to say, I am highly impressed with this new release. For a split second there, I had abandoned the idea of using iPhoto and focused on a future with Picasa… Where do your photos belong?
photo via MacRumors
Remember, if you skip iPhoto for Picasa you will never experience how Apple meant the integration of photos on the iPhone, in iMovie, Apple TV, Photo Books etc. I’m using Lightroom now, but seriously thinking about going back to iPhoto because I’m missing some cool stuff.
I guess it would be like using Winamp on your Mac when it’s much easier to stay with iTunes.
At least Mac users have a choice. Windows users have no choice except Google and that joke called Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Joke Maker.
I’m a devoted Mac user, a Google follower, retired web developer, and self-professed geek. Though I agree wth the stated virtues of iPhoto…there is just something better about using Picasa 3 (latest build) with Picasa Web Albums, something I use almost daily. I also think the Facebook integration is better with Picasa…not that it isn’t sufficient on iPhoto.
All that said, the folder structure in Picasa won’t let me configure albums the way I want…or else I’m just missing it.
In iPhoto, under “Albums” you can add folders, then add albums to those folders. E.g. I have a folder named “Vacations” and the albums in that folder are “Vacation 2008″, “Vacation 2007″, *Trip to Vancouver”, etc. Thus I have maybe 20 primary folders and hundreds of albums in them instead of hundreds of albums displaying without knowing what they’re related to.
With Picasa, the Folders are hardwired to the “folder years” it imports from iPhoto when it’s being installed, so I have “2009, 2008,2007, etc.” and I can’t add folders as Picas only uses actual folders from my hard drive. If I try to manually add a folder to Picasa it brings up the Folder Manager so I can select an actual folder from my hard drive structure on my Mac.
I thought I could solve this by simply adding albums to Picasa that matched my folder names (like Vacation) in iPhoto and then adding subfolders to each of these, but Picasa doesn’t allow sub-albums.
Hopefully, I’m just missing something…I can’t believe I’m the only person that wants pictures organized in such a logical way. If this can’t eventually be solved…I’ll have to stay with iPhoto.
Larry
I use both iphoto and picassa. iphoto only allows me to upload to facebook or flikr and I don’t have accounts for either, whereas in picasa the upload to my picassa web album is almost seamless. Furthermore, when a photo is brought into my iphoto, it automatically appears in Picassa. The only thing I don’t like about importing all of my photos into iphoto is that it creates the destination for you and it’s hard to change what file the photo is saved under. If you do, it ruins your thumbnails and you have to reload all over again. If you import an individual photo it has a folder unto itself even if it belongs with other photos. Sure it shows up in grouped events, but I don’t like hundreds of folders for a single photo.
Really good point Ruben.