Thanks Are In Order

to all that is holy.

thank you google, thank you thank you thank you, for finally bringing out the picasa for mac application for which i've been waiting and waiting.

(i don't have boot camp, so i couldn't have run the PC version on my mac.)

<http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2009/01/announcing-picasa-for-mac.html>

i was just thinking yesterday, as i uploaded my pictures from my winter break travels to picasa web albums, that iphoto is really not an intuitive or user-friendly piece of software. although the slider thing where you can choose how many pictures you want to see in each row in your albums is pretty neat, and although some of the edit features (especially the special effects like sepia and vignette) are cool, too, those are about the only front-end features in iphoto that are actually exciting to me.

(i just recently discovered "smart albums", and even that is strictly OK, because i can totally see how the conditional logic it requires would fail quite easily given how i work with my photos).

so yeah, other than silly cosmetic things -- ugh. i mean, what on earth is an "event"? and why can't you see all of them in the left-hand bar if you want to? why is "last import" the only pre-set viewing option, instead of a nice calendar-like thing like picasa has? why can you not trash photos from within your albums, making you go back to events view all the time? why can you not view photos larger and click between them using simple arrow keys?

this is not even to mention the features i was missing out on by not having picasa installed on my mac (although these, admittedly, are failings on google's end). like, why does the picasa web uploader for iphoto only allow uploading and not downloading (the entire album download feature is the best thing ever!!!)? and why does the uploader not integrate more intuitively into iphoto, such as by being housed in the "share" menu and not the "export" menu?

on and on i could go. but i'll stop now, cuz i wanna go download the thing asap, already. i bet it'll be sleek, and pretty, and exciting. yessss!