Google has finally released a version of their Picasa desktop application for Mac.  I have been waiting for this for a while and it couldn’t come a minute sooner.

Our iPhoto library here at home is over 63GB and has almost 16,000 items (photos and movies) and gave me a big scare a few weeks ago when the library wouldn’t show any pictures except for the ones that I had imported from my camera in December 2008 (this was still in December).  Luckily I was able to copy the library off to another hard drive, open the backup copy and do some maintenance to get it working.  But we did lost the pictures that had worked from that December upload.

I think what I would need to do with iPhoto is break our 1 big library into smaller libraries, maybe by year to keep that running more smoothly.  I think I’m going to work on pulling everything out of iPhoto and moving it into Picasa.  This is also because our Flickr service is up for renewal and I don’t think I want to continue with it.  I have been putting pictures on Picasa’s Web Albums lately and I like that much more than Flickr.

Between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Picasa, I really must say that I’ve been very impressed with all of the Google products that are now a part of my daily life.