Though I’ve drunk most of the Mac Kool-Aid, iPhoto still leaves me longing for Picasa. The short list of reasons are Picasa’s more automated post-processing, better tagging system, and use of image metadata for tags and captions.
Last week I stumbled across a suggestion to try CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac, and found it works great! It’s $60 for the commercial version of WINE, with a 30-day trial. Even though I’m a free software zealot, $60 to be able to process photos on the road and not have to maintain a Linux box is well worth it.
Moving the rest of my [Photo Processing Process] wasn’t too difficult of a transition between Linux and Mac OS X with its Unix underpinnings. MacPorts was able to install and upgrade the necessary packages, save from one I compiled from the tarball. Nothing like a little ./configure; make; sudo make install to brighten your day!
One thing that didn’t work was transferring Picasa’s closed database. This isn’t a big deal since most information is stored in the image headers or Picasa.ini file in each directory, but I did lose the order of the pictures in the albums. Most of my albums are sequenced to tell a story, so it’s a bit maddening to me that almost every photo package ignores this or hides it from you. I do have the order preserved in the files used to generate my web albums, though feeding this back into Picasa’s closed database is nigh impossible 
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