Apple's iPhoto or Google's Picasa?

Many of my readers probably have never even heard of Picasa. If you have, you probably didn't know it was a photo suite very similar to iPhoto. In fact, it is so good I thought I would do a side by side comparison for you people, thus letting you decide what piece is best for you. Let me first just list the pros and cons.


Beloved iPhoto:

• Price: $79 (iLife Suite) unless you just bought a mac.
• Editing Tools: Auto/manual red-eye correction, retouch tool, contrast and color options.
• Organizational Tools: iPhoto allows you organize your photos with face recognition. Thus, you can assign a name to someone's photo and then find all photos with that person (pretty cool). You can also organize your photos by event and place (also very handy).
  
• Online sharing: iPhoto allows you to upload to three places: facebook, mobileme, and flickr.
• Operating Systems: Mac OS X only
  

Google's Picasa:

• Price: Free.
• Editing Tools: Auto/manual red-eye correction, retouch tool, contrast and color options, B&W focal point, soft focus point, and much more.
• Organizational Tools: Picasa automagically finds all photos on your system when you first start it. You can organize by album or by folder. Either way, you have to assign new folders to photos that you import. Picasa does have face recognition, but it doesn't allow you to assign faces to names like iPhoto.
  
• Online sharing: You can blog right from Picasa. Thus, you just click on the images you want to upload to your blog and you click Blog This. You can also upload to your gmail Picasa account online. In addition, when you click on the Shop button, you can upload your photos to a whole bundle of different printing shops (this feature is extremely easy to use). Some of them include winkflash.com, shutterfly.com, walmart.com, and snapfish.com.
  
• Operating Systems: Linux, Mac, Windows

So, who takes the cake? That's for you to decide. I love the fact Picasa is free. I also love its ease of use when ordering prints. It is much easier to upload photos from Picasa than from any other web interface. In addition, when blogging with photos, Picasa is a must-have. It makes blogging extremely easy. Will I use Picasa on my mac? Maybe, for now I will still use iPhoto. However, most of my photos are on my Linux machine anyhow and that is where I use Picasa. If you don't use a mac, Picasa takes the cake, obviously.

Good luck deciding. If you are curious about Picasa, give it a try. It's free and it won't hurt to try it.

Try Google's Picasa!

Hack This!

Just recently, I realized that I wanted a place that I could share my thoughts and opinions about computers. I am not an expert computer scientist nor will I ever become one. Let's just say I am well-informed. I thought it would be useful to post my thoughts about software, hardware, computer malfunctions, design, and just plain old programming. And in the spirit of illbehonest I wanted to allow people to ask any computer related questions they wished to, whether that be how to fix something up or how to break it. Not that I will be able to fully answer every computer-related question, but I will be an attempt to give it my best shot. If I don't know the answer, I am 99% sure I can find it for you. The 1% is my intelligencia fallback net.

Now, getting down to business, let's talk about software for your mac. You don't like spending money on software. No one does. Sometimes you can get lucky and find a good piece of software that really does what you need and the price is $0. This is nice. A good website to explore for these kinds of goodies is thriftmac.com. This site is a library of links that will allow you to find several different pieces of freeware. For example, Coconut Battery, which can be found at thriftmac.com, is a great utility that will tell you how long you have until that battery inside that beautiful macbook of yours will die. Art Rage is another program listed on the site that is fun for kids. It's a suped-up drawing program with lots of different brushes. The free version is limited in its tools, however. If you're looking save a grip of cash and don't want to search the web for freeware, head to thriftmac.com.