Getting Started with Picasa for the Mac
January 22, 2009 by Sukrit Dhandhania
Recently Google released Picasa, their free photo management software, for the Mac. Picasa has gained immense popularity on the Windows platform. It’s a good alternative for iPhoto that ships with most Macs, if you are unhappy with it. Here’s a video tour of the application. For those unfamiliar with Picasa, it’s an application that allows you to manage your photographs, create albums, edit them… and Google also has a web based service where you can upload these images and share them with your friends.
Without much ado, let’s proceed with installation. Head over to the download site and download the latest release of Picasa for the Mac. It’s a rather large download - 17.2 MB. So it might take some time depending on the speed of your Internet connection.
After the download completes it should mount automatically. If not double click on the downloaded file to mount it. Drag the file in the mounted folder into your system’s Applications folder to complete the installation. To launch it double click on the Picasa application in the Applications folder.
You will be requested to agree to the terms and conditions. Next you will come to a screen which will ask you if you want Picasa to scan your computers Documents folder for pictures, or your entire computer. I picked the first option. Click Continue.
Picasa will then scan the part of the hard drive you asked it to and import the images at hand. It will also import images from iPhoto if you already use that. It will synchronize and import photographs from any devices you may have, like it did for my iPhone and my digital camera. Unfortunately the import process seems to pick up everything on your hard drive. I didn’t really appreciate that feature, as it imported images from web pages, from documents I have saved somewhere in my hard drive etc. So I spent some time clearing out what I did not want. I suggest you do the same.
The image above is what the main screen looks like. On the left you can navigate through the Folders and Albums that you create. Double click on a photograph to edit it. In the editing window you can perform some basic post-processing.
If you have an account with the Picasa web albums you can export a photograph or an album to it. To do that click on the photograph or the album and click the button with the tag Upload. That should do the trick for you. There are a few more things you can do using Picasa. Check out the Tools menu for some of these options.
The big difference between the Windows Version and the Mac version is that you can not export to html, which is going to be one of the leading issues that will see limited use of Picasa on the Mac.