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January 15, 2008

Google Developing Mac Version Of Picasa, Due To Be Released This Year

Duncan Riley

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googpicassa.jpg
Google’s Picasa photo management software is often regarded by many (particularly Windows users) to be the best basic image editing and management software on the market. Although a desktop app it’s crucially a conduit to Picasa Web Album’s, Google’s challenger to the Yahoo owned Flickr.

I was struck this morning as to how prominent the Picasa logo on Google banners and employee T-Shirts was at Macworld, particularly given that there’s no Mac version of Picasa, although there is a stand alone image uploader.

I asked if Picasa for Mac was coming, and as luck would have it I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year.

She then tried back tracking and pointed me to the people who were suppose to answer these queries. After explaining that I’d been told by their colleague that Picasa for Mac was coming and all I wanted now was the release date, they said that they wouldn’t confirm or deny the fact, saying that the use of the logo was part of a promotion for Picasa Web Albums, but said all of this whilst smiling like Cheshire cats. They then put me in front of a camera and made me tell them how much I liked Google as punishment (after I told them I was writing the story anyway) and gave me a free pair of thongs (flip-flops). Sorry guys, the bribery needs to be better than that :-)

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Comments

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  1. CanCar

    January 15th, 2008 at 12:57 pm

    The use of t-shirts is a good marketing strategy. And Google could not remain back!

  2. BeingParents

    January 15th, 2008 at 1:14 pm

    Nice T-Shirt. Off line advertising still rocks.
    Google has done a great jobs of accommodating everyone.

  3. Dennis Bjørn Petersen

    January 15th, 2008 at 1:14 pm

    Thank you for showing the t-shirt and not a picture of you wearing the flip-flops =P

    I do think it would be a first time at TechCrunch though… ;)

  4. Boring Market

    January 15th, 2008 at 1:25 pm

    The more Google apps compatible with Apple Computers the better.

  5. Julien

    January 15th, 2008 at 1:32 pm

    My God, Google has released a mac version of an app and had had promotional T-Shirts printed. This company is aaaammaaaazzzinnng….

  6. Russell Heimlich

    January 15th, 2008 at 1:34 pm

    Thank you, thank you, thank you! iPhoto is horrible! Picasa is the best!

  7. Jo Potts

    January 15th, 2008 at 1:55 pm

    Yes yes yes!! The best news I’ve heard all year! I’m surprised it took them this long though. I’ve tried to like iPhoto but it’s simply nowhere near as good as Picassa.

  8. BlueMoose

    January 15th, 2008 at 2:05 pm

    Who’s the slouching guy?

  9. luke

    January 15th, 2008 at 2:07 pm

    Just when i’d given up on ever seeing a mac version and finally made the switch to lightroom.

    Basic users will welcome this with open arms, iphoto is dire. Picasa is a brilliant way to browse / search your whole library- hopefully v3 might have something to do with that face recognition company google aquired ages ago…

  10. Don Lind

    January 15th, 2008 at 2:18 pm

    Picasa for the Mac is fine.

    But for goodness sake… Where’s the update for the PC version? It’s been 16 months!!!!!

    Why didn’t this guy ask when Picasa3 for the PC is going to be released? :-)

  11. TechNewsSource

    January 15th, 2008 at 2:26 pm

    The Mac is getting it all…First Office 2008 and now Picasa.

  12. Zorba

    January 15th, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    About time:) iphoto is horrid…
    Thank-you google, but hurry up

  13. gyula csocsan

    January 15th, 2008 at 3:10 pm

    for me the t-shirt is ok, but the mac is not ok

  14. techmine

    January 15th, 2008 at 3:39 pm

    By far the best news for me today. I am in so much need of a better photo tool on my macs that I pre-ordered Photoshop elements 6 for mac due in April. But I guess I can cancel that :) Google could not have ignored this most requested software from Mac community.

  15. zedwards

    January 15th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    So basically you got some big-mouth google employee fired. Way to go! :P

  16. gabyu

    January 15th, 2008 at 4:13 pm

    My first reaction about this news is : too late … :/

    Today, Apple decided to show their users that Flickr is the best social-based web application since they are using Flickr for connecting people’s photos over AppleTV.

    Apple brings the software, and Flickr the host. It’s perfectly matching !

  17. Duncan Riley

    January 15th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

    zedwards
    I didn’t name the poor girl, but I had to put the story in context, after all, the official line from Google will be “we don’t confirm or deny anything.” Also she didn’t have to admit it.

  18. King

    January 15th, 2008 at 4:23 pm

    Picasa is excellent software. I’d love to see it on the Mac!

  19. Matthew Kanwisher

    January 15th, 2008 at 6:12 pm

    Thank goodness, iphoto is alright but Picasa is the one app I’m missing in my total switchover to OSX.

  20. TheDuhMoment

    January 15th, 2008 at 8:52 pm

    Actually, Duncan, I think you got played. What a neat way to get you to write up a blog entry!

  21. Iqbal Sajid

    January 15th, 2008 at 9:54 pm

    Google is working very nicely. Providing solutions to all domains of ppl.
    When talking about Mac, Now you don’t need to buy a Mac if u want to run Mac OS. You can install Mac OS on you PC or Notebook. See details at the following link.

    http://cd-bills.blogspot.com/2.....-os-x.html

  22. nina

    January 16th, 2008 at 5:24 am

    Best news of the day. Picasa is the only App. I’ve missed since switching. iPhoto sucks royally compared to the beauty and ease of Picasa.

    Finally!

  23. qrius

    January 16th, 2008 at 2:27 pm

    can someone explain in detail what picasa can do what iphoto 08 cannot? I use both extensively, and hardly see any difference. I prefer iphoto in that you can quickly create a slideshow with music and export to quicktime. Picasa can’t do that. well, it can, but the output is pretty ugly.

  24. Rob Lambert

    January 16th, 2008 at 2:37 pm

    I haven’t used Picasa in a long time, so I can’t vouch for how good it is today, but I overall don’t have much of a problem with iPhoto, especially in iLife 6 … I don’t quite know what people hate about it. I’m still more than willing to try out the new Mac Picasa when it ships.

  25. Thomas

    January 16th, 2008 at 2:41 pm

    Finally. Two things I am missing since my switching to Mac last january are Picasa and a good finance app. Not far away it will be only one thing. ;-)

  26. Thomas

    January 16th, 2008 at 2:48 pm

    qrius, it’s simple.

    Picasa sorts the picture for directories. So each directory will be an album. In iPhoto I have to create every new album manually. Until now I don’t found some way to do this automatically.

    And iPhoto 7 is very slow compared to Picasa for Window$.

  27. hardcoreUFO

    January 16th, 2008 at 3:29 pm

    Who. Cares.

    I have no faith that Google will put any effort into this application at all. Witness the disasters that are Google Notifier (completely broken for the mac) and Google Desktop (try getting support for this). Google products for the Mac are just sad ports of Windows apps. Mac will always — always — be a second class citizen to Google.

    You get what you pay for with Google.

  28. Jim

    January 16th, 2008 at 5:52 pm

    I don’t have any issues with Google Notifier on my Mac. Google Desktop is a complete waste of time with OSX because most of the functionality is already in the OS or available with apps with a much smaller footprint.

    But Picasa would be a welcome competitor to not only Flickr and iPhoto, but .Mac as well.

  29. krangsquared

    January 17th, 2008 at 3:06 am

    Yes!! Just the news I’ve been waiting for. I just bought an iMac 2 wks ago, and the thing that’s causing me headaches is figuring out how to move over 60Gb of photos to iPhoto. Apparently iPhoto 08 stores *all* the photos in a single database. Hmm… a single 60Gb file holding all my memories from the past 4 years? Ah… why.. NO.

    Now what would really be cool is a converter so that current iPhoto users can also get their info migrated easily to Picasa. And maybe something like a plugin API so that users can add functionality for Picasa (like an integrated Flickr Uploader - come on guys, just give up… there is *no* comparison between Picasa albums and Flickr)

  30. Gardfield

    January 17th, 2008 at 8:03 am

    YES !
    I switched to Mac 3 months ago and the only application I really miss is Picasa.
    Let’s wait and see if it comes out …and if it works fine :-)

  31. Furball

    January 17th, 2008 at 5:26 pm

    Yes! Please, mighty gods of Mac conversion, work your magic on Roboform next!!!!

  32. Steve J.

    January 18th, 2008 at 12:24 am

    It’s about fucking time!!! :)

  33. Dan W

    January 18th, 2008 at 7:12 pm

    I guess I’m not that concerned. I really like iPhoto. The events functionality is fantastic and the tagging is really quite great. It is better than the folders that are created by Picasa as it takes less work when you do your imports. Albums are manual, but they are a different concept. Plus you can use tagging to do smart albums.

    It was so fun and east to create a slideshow and send it off to iDVD and create a nice dvd to share with the family as a christmas present.

    I really liked Picasa, but I can’t say I miss it. As for the way iPhoto stores all of the files, well, that is fine. It’s all the same to me. I am either backing up a whole directory structure or one file. In reality it is a directory structure under the hood. Apple just hides it from you like they do with applications.

    Maybe people aren’t giving it a fair chance. It’s different, but so is the mac.

    Dan

  34. J Luther

    January 19th, 2008 at 8:40 am

    Nice. Count me in. I’ve really (really) missed Picasa since my switch. It took a lot to convince my wife to give up our PC for a Mac, and now she despises iPhoto. It got me into big trouble so I set her up to run Picasa in bootcamp. Not ideal, but better than iPhoto, which was a good app five years ago but has really stagnated since.

    Now all we need is a decent version of Quicken. ;-)

  35. Michael Slater

    January 19th, 2008 at 5:55 pm

    Picasa can upload directly to Flickr… Select the photos you want and then email them to your flickr private email address — they get posted immediately.

    iPhoto isn’t very nice. I don’t like how it wants to move all my images off my NAS and into its own directory storage. Consequently I’m temporarily using Adobe Bridge, which at least lets me browse the directories nicely.

  36. Rob

    January 24th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

    I am excited to hear about this. I am a recent switcher and the only program I really miss is Picasa. I hate iphoto. It frustrates me how it duplicates all of your photos and then you can’t delete or edit the originals. It is a horrible design that makes me have to keep my pc around for photo editing and organizing.

  37. Kevbo

    January 27th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

    Great to have Picasa for the Mac on top of iPhoto. Just hope they share the iPhoto database. Two sets of tags, album structures, events would render Picasa useless. Love Picasa on the PC where it’s the only decent entry-level photo management package, but hope Picasa can also fit into the iLife world gracefully.

  38. Kathleen

    January 28th, 2008 at 9:13 am

    QRIUS: Iphoto only lets you order books from Kodak directly and they only let you order one version of a photo book at a time, making you pay a $5 shipping for each and every book. PICASA gives you a list of printing companies that you can order from (my fav is shutterfly). You can save ALOT of money this way, especially if you need to order more that one book at a time. ALSO, Kodak does not have all of the larger print formats available. So the sizes of photos you can order are limited. ALSO, Iphoto does not have a decent soft focus tool. Their “soft focus” only allows you to center where the in focus image is….this is very olan mills/ jc penny to me. Picasa allows you to decide for yourself where you want the photo to be in focus and then blurred. ALSO Iphoto’s soft focus really just looks pixalated, not fuzzed out. BAD! Those are just the main differences that stand out to me. I also like the way Picasa organizes the photos much better than Iphoto. I hope this helps! PLEASE OH PLEASE PICASA….BRING YOURSELF TO MAC QUICKLY!

  39. Van the Man

    February 3rd, 2008 at 4:02 am

    That is great news! Recently switched to Mac, lashed out on a 24″ iMac, and really like it a lot. My wife is a professional photographer and really loves the mac but missed Picasa! iPhoto is good in a lot of ways, it looks beautiful, the slideshows are cool, the ‘events’ function is handy, I didn’t have any problems importing 20 Gig of photos from our external HD. But Picasa has a few effects we use a lot, like the ‘Glow’ function, looks lovely on brides! I have been trying to emulate them in iPhoto but I just can not do it. The’soften function does not work, you can only ’sharpen’, this sucks, our digitsl photos are often too sharp especially for portraits. I also have Photoshop Elements, and I can come close but it takes me 10 x as long, using filters etc., hate the programme. My wife can not use Photoshop at all, and why should she? Please hurry up Google.

  40. saiyad

    February 3rd, 2008 at 11:35 am

    how can add jpeg file on google

  41. ctmajor

    February 6th, 2008 at 9:18 am

    GREAT. I Just got a Mac and need Picasa. WHEN is later in the year? Next week??

  42. sébastien

    February 7th, 2008 at 3:41 pm

    ctmajor: when it’s done.

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