Thursday, March 15, 2007

Picasa 2 on OSX with Crossover Mac

I was a windows user for a long time, too long in fact, but I finally made the switch to OSX and it's been great except for one thing... I missed Picasa. It's really a great photo management program and since iPhoto really wasn't meating my IPTC data expections I decided that I need to figure out how to get Picasa running on my MacBook. I googled "Picasa for OSX" and that gave me pretty much nothing except a bunch of links to posts about people, like me, wishing that Picasa would run on thier Mac. Google released a linux version of Picasa so there was hope that a version for OSX would soon be out but unfortunately as of the date of this post Picasa is only for Windows and Linux machines.

I was using Picasa though Parallels Desktop for a while in combination with a mapped network drive in windows to my photo directories in OSX but the need to boot windows every time I wanted to look at some photos became really annoying. I then came across Crossover Mac from Codeweavers which lets your run some windows applications without the need to have windows. Sure enough I downloaded the software, installed Picasa and I was up it was up and running within minutes! Viola! I was so happy to have Picasa running natively in OSX, even Picasa's spiffy DirectX animations worked.

The only problem I have been having is getting Picasa to import the directories I'd like it to import; even though I ask it to monitor specific directories and import the photos from that directory and it's subdirectories it still took me about an hour to get all 3000+ of my photos in Picasa. A small price to pay for having this wonderful program on my computer.

Thanks to "Donut" for pointing out that if you used the Picasa 2 designed for windows 98 you will experience a new perfect photo editing experience with almost no bugs!

Hopefully Google will soon release Picasa Mac so that I don't have to use this work-around for very long.

10 comments:

Donovan Mueller said...

Isn't this wonderful? I was so thrilled that I can do this.

What version of Picasa 2 are you using? I've been having troubles with the latest version when I try to move photos from one folder to another and some other things. Are you having these troubles with the latest version?

I'm using an old version kept around for Win98 users (Picasa 2 1884, I think) and that works.

trekerboy said...

I was using 2.6.0, and I am having similar problems with folders... specifically that picasa will not add photos from folders with subfolders. Hopefully the disk management interface will be enhanced with the next version of crossover.

Donovan Mueller said...

You can get the older version here: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26902&query=windows+98&topic=&type=

It seems to work pretty much flawlessly.

pax said...

Evrika!
Thank you so much - you're my hero of the day!
I was looking for a long time - with no luck, so far - for a Picasa equivalent for Mac.
alex

Michiel van der Ros said...

Sweet! I'm glad this showed up high in my google results. I just switched too and neither iPhoto, XSee, Xee, Phoenix Slides, Canon Image browser or Adobe Bridge can do what Picasa can do.
Now I just hope to find a way to import my library of comments. I managed to import my PC iTunes library, so I'm hopeful :)

Baconators said...

Hi I downloaded the demo version of Crossover Mac and Picasa works but if I shut down my Mac Mini I have to restart Crossover and reload Picasa every time, is that because I'm using the demo version?
Richard

anette said...

u just made my year!!!

i switched to mac in september, and the only bad thing is that i cannot use picasa. i´ve tried almost anything.

u´re my hero!

Sephamorr said...

Using wine is free.
Install X11 from the mac install disk.
Install macports
run in terminal 'sudo /opt/local/bin/port install wine'
download and install picasa as you would with wine with terminal is it has no graphical interface in X11

MariusF said...

If been tried various options, what suits me best is to run Picasa on a XP VM using Fusion. All data is on my HFS mac disk. The photo folder on the mac is mapped as a networkdrive for Picasa. No issues for me with this setup.

Павел Пономарёв said...

by the way, Picasa 3 works on crossover office too. The only problem is that it does not see external firewire drive...