Picassa2 v. iPhoto

Cracked me up to see Picassa describing itself as iPhoto for the Mac. Here are the strengths of both:

Makes it easy to organize your photos on your computer -- even if you're not organized.

Lets you easily post photos to web sites, email, etc.

Has nice built-in image editing features, so you really don't have to use something like Photoshop very often.

Picassa is wonderfully "light" which means it's quick to load and boot up, unlike most other Windows equivalents.

Relatively easy to use, although both have anomalies.

The anomalies:

Picassa is clever in that it never changes the original -- just keeps track of deltas. This gets tricky when you want to have a folder full of your "new" images which you take somewhere else. For this, you need the "export" function, which is a little tricky.

I had to relearn the Mac after being away from it for 15 years. There was stuff that drove me crazy: 1.) It didn't ask me if I wanted to confirm changes. My color photo is now black and white and there's no way of getting it back? 2.) For all its integration of multimedia features, why can't I play more than one song when I play a slide show? Or, why is there a 48 picture limit when you post to the web -- or why doesn't someone tell you this first? Devil's in the details when you are trying to make things both easy and robust.

I can't recommend to anyone that they get a Mac, as Picassa does a great job. The thing that I cherish about the Mac, however, is its ability to do lots of different screen affects and transitions on its gorgeous monitor -- something you can't do on a Windows-based machine.