Picasa is so much better than iPhoto - Page 2

Yay, manual backup without preserving metadata!

I just wanted to post that i Think Picasa is Great, after coming off of Macs and going to a PC i was a little lost about how i would mange my photo's. Not only was Picasa Free but it was really easy to use. Thanks for a terrific free program Google! Its red eye reduction isnt as good as iphoto but for a free program i am not complaining. If you got a PC and you need a cheap and easy to use photo program this is it.

Multiple Libraries

No one has really answered the first question for you, so I will. I want the ability to have separate libraries in iPhoto. For example, images that I skim from the web could be in one library, while photos I take with my camera are in another. There would be no need to have every image you want to use iPhoto to organize to be mixed together in the 'library view.' And creating 'images from web' and 'photos from camera' albums to separate them is a stop-gap measure because then the 'library view' is completely useless.

This ability is also useful for people that want to separate work and home photos. If you use your Mac for both work and home (possible work for yourself or work from home), it would be nice to have the ability to separate photos that are part of your work and photos that are personal.

Yet another example... What if you like to take some risque photos with your girl/boyfriend? Wouldn't you like to store them in a separate library from the Christmas photos that you want to show your parents?

Backup

The suggestion of 'dragging and dropping' from iPhoto to a disc is fine, but you lose the meta-data. You also lose the originals to revert back to in this process. This is not a useful way to back it up. This is only useful if you want to drag an album to a disc to give to someone else.

iPhoto needs a way to back up the entire library to a location. Backup to another hard drive (internal or external) would be an excellent backup feature. The ability to burn the backup to CD or DVD would be a great feature as well. But when it comes to CD or DVD Apple would need to have the ability to allow the backup to span disks (for people with libraries greater than 700MB or 4489MB). There needs to be a built-in system for creating this backup, or at least a helper-app that launches from iPhoto to allow to create said backup.

As for people that had problems with a manually backed-up iPhoto library, did you backup the folder to a FAT32 volume instead of a HFS+ volume? If so it could have lost resource forks... Also iPhoto uses hard links (I think it's hard, not soft links) in the Album folders it creates. The last I delved into the topic of the iPhoto Library folder I found that all of the photos were stored in one location, and then iPhoto created folder for each of the albums and created hard links in those folders to the photos that are in the other location. FAT32 does not support hard or soft links, and I don't think that Finder has a way of dealing with such a conversion. (Finder has a way of dealing with resource forks from HFS+ -> FAT32)

Better Storage

I think people are talking about the way that Picasa allows you to create your own organizational system with files and folders. Picasa doesn't force you to keep all of your photos in a location that it dictates, and it doesn't force you to use it's organizational conventions. You can create your own folders and throw pictures in them how you see fit, and it will find them and index them all the same. Now this can be a good and a bad thing. I think that a lot of people like the fact that iPhoto basically handles all that stuff in the background for them. But more tech savvy people tend to want to organize the stuff in the way that they want.

can someone change the title of this thread to...

"Picasa is soooooooooooooooo better than iPhoto!"

that's how i read it every time.

Having separate libraries, and having one library with multiple albums, achieves the same results.

In either case, you have to specifically import your "work" photos or your "webcam lovin'" photos or whatever into their respective library/album. Separate libraries saves you no time here.

However, it has a number of cons.

First, it's confusing and adds unnecessary complexity to the interface. There needs to be a way to sort create/manage libraries in addition to albums, etc. This creates more work for the end user, and is plain annoying.

Second, it makes it harder to find things. Say you have ten libraries, how do you know which one that one picture was in? You'd have to search all ten. (Unless there was an uber-library, which brings us back where we started.

What you want is better served with albums, smart albums, and keywords.

Also, you're right about hiding risque/confidential pictures. But that's a problem best left up to a scheme of password protecting sets of images and hiding them. Wouldn't that be a lot better than your mom clicking on the wrong library by accident?

Not if you password protect that library - something that Picasa lets you do.

Backup.

It's a program from Apple... it works (with iPhoto).

Yes, you have to be a .mac member, but hey, if you don't like it, buy a Dell.

What on earth is wrong with paying for something you like/want ???

What would your response be to: "Hey, if you don't like the way Word:Mac works, buy a Dell" ?

Asking and expecting applications that involve large amounts of data to have a simple way to backup that data is in no way a reason to tell others to 'buy a Dell'. Had they wanted a Dell, they would get a Dell. They want OS X and they want iPhoto to have a simple backup option.

You know, like iTunes allows you to backup your music by burning Data CDs or DVDs. Or like Mail.app allows you to backup your e-mail messages. Suggesting that one buy Backup.app from Apple in order to do what ever other decent photo organization app does.. is not a good argument, to say the least.

that's what i'm going to do. immediately. what a goony thing to say.

$99 a year for a backup program??? i don't like Apple THAT much!

maybe i'm just pissed since i planned on using that iTools address for life. i couldn't even forward!

my point was, there IS a simple way to backup iPhoto ... Backup will do it to CD's, DVD's or a HD and it does incremental backups either on command, or on a schedule ...
(and I don't use Word:Mac ... still using AppleWorks and it still does more than I need it to.)

It does work perfectly assuming you are working with the very same, say identical,
version of iPhoto. If not you always can hold option key while launching iPhoto.
Than you can choose an existing iPhoto library OR create a new one.
And this is the answer to all, who are asking about managing various
iPhoto libraries. Granted this is a widely unknown feature

Anyways...it's clear to me now that Picasa isn't "so much better" than iPhoto. It could be "somewhat better" at most. My opinion? It's a stale mate...somethings Picasa does better, other things iPhoto does better.

iPhoto 5 (aka 2005) is almost a year old...Picasa 2 isn't quite as old. iPhoto 2006 will probably bring substantial new features (fingers crossed on CoreData and CoreImage) as well as a GUI revamp (something closer to iTunes 6 (less brushed-metal bulkiness, more unified slimness.)

It's interesting how you come to that conclusion without ever having used Picasa.

You know I bet if Apple sold backup for $19.95 like they do QT Pro upgrades it'd do quite well because it is a decent backup program. Just a shame they bundle it with .mac and not the OS.

Would you pay $100,000 for a Ford Focus? There's a difference between demanding free and demanding a reasonable price.

I downloaded Picasa at work and fooled around with it a bit. It has a nice backup feature. It will allow you to back up to a CD/DVD and it will keep track of what you backed up so that you can make sure that your backups don't have duplicates. Not sure how it handles originals/edits with respect to backups though. I would say this is a lot better than iPhoto.

But software packages that are free like Picasa already have the backup features in them. People have to pay Apple for iPhoto and it doesn't have those features? Apple could implement a subset of the features of Backup in iPhoto. It doesn't need every last feature. Just incremental CD/DVD backups of the photos / albums / library meta-data.

Not really. When you have separate libraries, the photos are completely separate from each other. There is no inter-mixing in an overall library.


It's not supposed to be a time-saver. It's supposed to be an organizational tool.



This could be a feature like tabs in Safari that is disabled by default that the user has to actively seek out and enable. Then the users who would be confused may never even notice that it's a feature. It's not like you are forced to use every last feature of every software package installed on your computer.


It's an organizational tool. As such, it means it needs to be used correctly. Using ten libraries is ridiculous. You wouldn't use a separate library for each album. That's not the point. You would use it maybe to have the following libraries: Images Saved From Web, Personal Photos, Work Photos, Risque Photos.

Those are clearly defined categories that you might not want to have mixed all together. If you are looking for a photo you took of a vacation, it's not going to be in 'Images Saved From Web.' That image of Bugs Bunny that you saved from a forum 2 months ago isn't going to be in 'Risque Photos.' Etc. The entire point would be that there would be separation along clearly defined lines. People that used the libraries to separate photos by year would quickly find their organizational scheme to be useless.

You shouldn't condemn something just because someone can use it stupidly.


Albums, smart albums and keywords would not help this situation.


The point would be that the wrong library would be hidden somehow or password protected. If all of the photos are in one library and your mom clicks on the library view to look at all your photos, then she would see the risque photos. If you create an album with all the risque photos and tell iPhoto to password protect all images in that album, how would you handle the library view for unauthenticated users?

Would you just have them not show up at all? That seems counter intuitive. Especially if you are going to have iPhoto telling you stats like the total # of photos in the library, or the total disk space usage. Would you just have all of the images display in their locations in the library view, but have blank thumbnails with maybe a lock over them to indicate that they are hidden? I somehow don't like that solution either.

The best solution would be more along the lines of a list of libraries on the left sidebar. When you click on a library, the list items below it are forced downward as it expands to show you all of the albums that this library has. Or maybe a drop-down menu above the sidebar that allows you to select the current library. Maybe with a lock next to protected (and not unlocked yet) libraries. Whenever a library is selected, the sidebar items are changed to reflect all of the albums/smart albums/etc that are in that library.

Like I said before, this could be confusing for some users, but by disabling it by default you eliminate that. Then the power users that may need the feature have the ability to use it if they need it.


As for the iPhoto library shortcut that was mentioned, I'll have to try that. If that's true it's a very hidden feature. And it seems like an excellent solution, but the better solution would be for iPhoto to manage the list libraries and the libraries themselves for you.

I used Picasa before switching to the Mac.

Thing is, I hardly use iPhoto. It's not convenient (a stark contrast from everything else in iLife). When I plug in my camera, I don't want it to import all the pictures, I want to be able to select.

Also, what about viewing the image in it's actual size? The zoom slider never tells me where the image is at its actual size.

Editing features are good for a photo management app, but I remember Picasa being simple to work.

Well, next iPhoto, then...

"Image Capture" does a better job of letting you select. It can give you a thumbnail view of what is on your camera so that you can select the pictures you want to pull over, but IIRC it doesn't import directly into iPhoto... It only allows you to set a preference to launch iPhoto on camera connect instead of it.

I've come to that conclusion since Picasa can't seem to do RAW and only understands one color profile. This is pretty bad, IMO.

Picasa is a consumer app, and a free one at that. Professionals use RAW, consumers use cheap digital cameras that shoot in JPEG.

And the color profile is bogus: that relates to instant messaging photos with Hello, another Google program directly from Picasa, not Picasa itself. Whoever said that Picasa understands just one color profile was talking out of his ass.

I'm a consumer and I use RAW. Uh oh!

(Un)fortunately for you, Picasa does support RAW.

Uh oh!

Ok, I'm not going to respond to all of that, but it all comes down to this.

Your main complaint is the presence of one omniscient library.

This is because you want your pictures sorted by work/personal/web/etc. This is incredibly easy to do, right now, in iPhoto. You can

• on importing, always drag into the designated Album, or
• more flexibly, you can create smart albums and tag your pictures

This gives you all the organization you want, very simply and easily. Of course, there's still a big library. Ignore it. Again, something really easy to do.

I'm not complaining about your system because it's easy to use it stupidly. I'm calling it out because it adds bloat, adds no functional value, and is only useful for those with extreme obsessive compulsive disorder.

You're right that iPhoto needs to allow options for password-protecting certain pictures, but your solution doesn't directly address this.

But, but, I thought this was a consumer app!

Thanks...I guess there's been much misinformation in this thread. I'll give the latest version a try.

Do remember though, Gene, that Picasa is enjoying a steady stream of upgrades while iPhoto only gets an update a year. You're comparing a version that's been out since October with a version that's been out since January. This is fine, I suppose but you can't expect a company that has as many apps as Apple to upgrade at the same speed the Picasa team upgrades its app. Come January 2006, I'm sure iPhoto will do everything Picasa does and more.

Alright, I'm not getting the complaints about lack of backing up from *WITHIN* iPhoto. Sorry, I just don't get that... do you expect to be able to back up your files from within Word?

What I see happening is people trying to back up by dragging their folder to another hard drive, or an optical disk, and successfully backing them up.

But then folks are talking about how when they restore, they end up with many copies of the images, at different editing stages... I don't see how that's possible, unless you're dragging the backed up folder onto iPhoto. That triggers an import of whatever is in the folder, and since iPhoto does indeed store multiple copies, you get multiple copies.

Hint: don't reimport the entire library, just quit iPhoto and restore the files in place by replacing ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/. Assuming that you're working with the same iPhoto version, it should do exactly as you would expect, including retaining metadata.

Import != restore.

If what you're wanting to do instead is archive the *last* version of each edited photo, such that you have one copy of each, and can reimport them later, then that's something different than simply backing up. Look to Export in the File menu to do that. You do lose metadata, which bites, but wait... doesn't iPhoto have the ability to export the metadata tabs for selected files? I could swear I've used that in the past.

And here we see the problem with having 'back up' inside iPhoto - some people want to archive all intermediate steps, a true backing up of the workflow and a snapshot of the disk space, while others want to just keep final versions around. The former is most easily doable with the Finder, while the latter needs some work.

Perhaps if there were some consensus on what y'all mean by 'backing up'...

Of course it's a consumer level app. First of all, it costs $0. Show me a pro app that costs $0 (developed by a company, responsible to its shareholders) and I'll cede this point to you.

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a consumer app too, and it too, has support for RAW. But only as an afterthought, or a somewhat 'power-user' feature. It's not its main feature. As it shouldn't be.


Well if people keep judging things they've never used (not directed at you) with things like "I have a PC friend.. he told me 29834 years ago he saw a green tint on a photo he had in Picasa.. so yeah, Picasa.. doesn't support more than one color profile" - of course there's going to be a lot of misinformation.

Though I can add one more thing where Picasa excels and iPhoto is a dog: speed. Picasa is a fast beast even with 20,000 photos whereas iPhoto, chokes, so to speak.

Give it a try though - it's pretty good no matter what people say.

Horrible example. Word isn't an interface for you to view/organize all of your word processing documents. Word is just an editor. iPhoto is supposed to be a way for you to store/organize/touch up your photos. iPhoto is supposed to be an interface to your photos and you shouldn't worry about the stuff in the iPhoto library folder. iPhoto stores all of your photos in a folder that is organized in a way that's not supposed to be 'user readable' so to speak. The entire purpose of iPhoto is to keep your photos in a place and have an interface to them so that users don't have to worry about the back-end of things.

Yea, power users can just drag the folder to back it up, but how about less savvy users? Having a backup inside of iPhoto will provide a common interface for people to use. Hell, they could make it all AppleScriptable so that rather than using the built-in backup in iPhoto you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with the backup interface.

But the other problem arises when the iPhoto library directory is larger than a DVD or CD. What if it's larger than 700MB and the user only has a CD burner? What if it's larger than 4489MB and the user only has a single-layer DVD burner?

Picasa has a backup feature. Not only that, it keeps track of what photos have already been burned to a backup disc. So you could create multiple-disc backups. This to me is a useful feature. Even if the meta-data isn't saved at least you have the files backed up somewhere in case of a hard drive failure, laptop theft, etc. I think that the multiple -disc backup is the most solid feature that a built-in iPhoto backup util would have going for it. Another solid feature would be the ability to sync the iPhoto library with another location, perhaps an external drive / network share.


There need not be a consensus. There could be a backup feature that allows the user to select the type of backup that they want.

"Full backup"
"Backup of Final Revisions"
etc

Agreed, but if you're *only* doing an en masse back up, you *DON'T* care where files are stored, do you? When you're backing up your mail, for example, you don't care about which mail message is stored where, you just want all your mail backed up. I don't see a Backup feature *inside* Mail, nor would I expect to.

I think this way leads to the Kitchen Sink Mentality... and Windows UI design.

This is what I meant by lack of solid definitions for what people meant by backing up... to me, and to most people, backing up is a mirroring of the current state of *everything*.

What I hear most people saying is "I want to move certain pictures aside for a while, but pull them back in later with preserved metadata". The term most often used for that is Archiving.


Again, clashing terminology. There's no reason to have a Backup feature in iPhoto, one in iTunes, one in iMovie, one in iDVD... when you can have a dedicated tool that only needs to know only a little bit about the file structure of each app. Think plugins into a backup tool.

Archiving is another issue, and one that I agree needs to be addressed, and *has* to be done from within iPhoto.


Again, a backup tool will have that capability built-in. No need to reinvent the wheel when existing solutions are out there.


Ah, see, that's archiving. And it *is* a useful feature.


Er, if you're not concerned about metadata, here's an iPhoto route to the same thing, more or less:

Select pictures.
Export pictures to disc.
Tag pictures as exported.

Not as smooth, definitely, but I think it provides the backbone for the same functionality. Perhaps a quick Applescript over the top?


Expect to see that in iLife '06, with the current push for syncing through .Mac. Also expect to see it remain a .Mac only feature, darn it.


Aaaaaaaand that would be consensus of terminology of what backing up means in various contexts. I wasn't saying "THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE TYPE OF BACKUP" but that in *THIS* thread, people were using the term for *many* styles of backing up, and that there needed to be a consensus on what the hell people meant by the various styles, and a better lexicon of phrasing. So we could discuss the actual issues instead of arguing about what 'backing up' meant.

How about we agree on the following:

Backing up: en masse, all files, all revisions, perfect snapshot of the entire archive, all edit chains, etc. Restoring from a back-up involves wholesale replacing of the current iPhoto library. All metadata preserved.

Archiving: Specific photos, would be 'forgotten' from current library, you want to be able to re-*integrate* them into the existing library as needed. Metadata preserved, edit-chain optional.

Exporting: Specific photos, just makes a copy of the current state of edits, does not alter current library, all metadata lost.

Then the discussion can be focussed on the need for, and requirements of, Archiving, since Exporting is currently handled inside iPhoto, and Backups are best handled by a dedicated tool outside the organization framework.

Good enough?

Archiving means creating a compressed archive in case you want to transfer those images in bulk to somebody or somewhere.

That's in no way similar to back-up. And Picasa doesn't follow Windows UI at all - as does no Google application.

Archiving is used for that, but if you think about it, it's the same situation... (and archiving using tar, for instance, involves no compression in the default case).

You're removing an item (photo or file, makes no difference) from the organizational tool at hand (iPhoto, Finder or shell), putting it somewhere safe (another volume or compression file) so that you can retrieve it later intact.

Which is why it's used for both situations. It's all about what context you're in. It has an old and established definition going back far pre-computers. Paper filings were frequently archived by businesses when they were no longer needed for fast access. Old filing cabinets would be hauled off to a warehouse for archiving. It's a removal from the current collection, put into a safe place for later retrieval only when needed.

And you're right, it's *NOT* backing up, which was my entire point. 'Back up' was being used in an erroneous and confusing way.

I never said Picasa uses the Windows UI, only that tossing every possible idea into an app leads to the same mess that Windows apps tend to have: featureitis. Most Linux apps have the same problem, and some Mac apps do too, but we tend to have cleaner apps in general. In any case, dumping a thousand small tasks into one app is a bad idea. Google has created an Archiving system within Picasa, and I'm advocating for the same thing in iPhoto.

Backing up is best left to a backup tool, because internals of the application aren't necessary to perform it.

Archiving is best done within the tool, since it requires knowing more information about how the internals of the app work.

I just wanted to get the terminology straight.

No, feature bloat doesn't have to impact speed at all, but it makes the interface difficult to navigate, and worse, it makes the code much more fragile and less able to be nimbly adapted. :/

iPhoto is no speed demon, and I don't find it hard to believe that Picasa is snappier.

Export it.

It's not so much that I have an emotional attachment to iPhoto than the fact that I hadn't tried Picasa in a year. I'm actually surprised how fast it progressed because Picasa surely wasn't the way it is today this time last year. I tried to come to conclusion based on what was said in this thread but there was so much misinformation that the real info only came out after my, admittedly, blunt comments.

I suppose it will be fair game to compare iPhoto 2006 to whatever Picasa has out in January or risk being labeled a Picasa-lover? And if it's anything like Aperture, Picasa will have a lot of catching up to do.

Kickaha,

I'm one who posted my issues with restoring a backup. At the moment I'm nervous about trying to get iPhoto back to where I think it should be, and I'd be grateful for your advice before I screw it up any more.

Quick recap: 3 months ago I copied the entire iPhoto folder to an external harddrive as a backup. Main HD failed, replaced. I was sure I copied the folder back, but ended up with multiple photo copies, and whilst iPhoto had the list of albums I'd created over the last few years, no photos were actually in them. I'm sure I copied the folder back (rather than dragged the folder over the iPhoto icon), otherwise how would iPhoto know about my albums?

Since then I've added new pictures to iPhoto, and created a new copy of the iPhoto folder on the external drive.

So I'm in the situation of having iPhoto with around 4000 pictures, of which about half are duplicates.

To get it clean do you recommend:

remove the current iPhoto folder.
copy the 3 month old untouched iPhoto backup folder back to the 'live' directory.
copy from the recent iPhoto folder copy only the subfolders that were created since the 3 month old one, into the live iphoto folder.

Will it cause a problem to iPhoto since I won't be copying over the non photo files held at the top level of iPhoto?

Thanks for any comments.

David

PS I understand what you mean about keeping a backup program separate from an archiving routine. I would suggest, though, that something like iPhoto where the source is totally personal (i.e. in iTunes in theory the source should only be CDs you own and online purchases and so a data loss should be replaceable) a backup routine is fundamental to the application. But whether it is as a general program that all iLife apps access, or built in, is moot.

There are rumors on the net that Google has bought startup company Riya
If Riya's promise holds true, this would really, really improve the usability of meta-data in consumer-picture software.

Haven't tried out picasa, so not gonna comment on that, but I think some of you guys are still stuck in windows way of thinking, that filename and folder are the only info to index files. When I first started using mac this was the biggest revelation for me. That there were a program for indexing music, a program for indexing pictures and so on, specified programs that understand the special needs of certain types of files. I wasn't limited any longer to creating directories to index my stuff, I don't have to manually move stuff from directory to directory to keep my archive in order. Just make simple rules (Smart folders/playlists) and things are automatically kept in order. OSX kindly hides all the underlying structures and and let's me work with metadata. That said I really hope Apple changes iPhoto to meta data editing in future.
Second thing is securing, if there is something I don't want to share with world it's in my FileVault protected home directory. Idea for password protected folders is sort of backwards thinking, you shouldn't be securing things that you don't want to share but sharing only the things you want. This is some thing Apple needs to sort out in future, how to wisely share things with others based on some simple rules, like share these pictures based on this rule to all users on this computer/all computers in LAN and so on. Apple hasn't yet figured out all the possibilities of metadata ideology, but at least they are one giant step ahead of Windows on this.