I stopped by the Google both on Friday, after having consumed the new features in iPhoto '09, in order to check out the new Picasa for Mac OS X. Here's a shot of the booth:
Google engineers demoing their wares at the Google booth.
And as for Picasa, while I didn't take any pictures, it does look interesting. One of the Picasa for Mac engineers was on the show floor, so I got some great answers to my technical questions. It seems like Picasa for Mac is written mostly in Carbon, which means it will need a significant re-write to go 64-bit (but this application can probably stay 32-bit for awhile without feeling too much pain). And while like John Gruber, I feel that Picasa on the Mac doesn't quite look mac-like, Picasa does have some strong features that separate it from the pack.
After some poking on the demo, I was able to get Google to show me how to easily add captions to photos in Picasa. The application seems particularly geared towards this -- you can start typing anywhere in the app, and if Picasa doesn't know where to send the keystrokes, it will shift focus to the caption, and start filling in the text there. Pressing "enter" when done will take you to the next picture. So it's very fast to go through a whole set of pictures, entering text for each one. So, big kudos for Google there.
Supposedly, Picasa works alongside iPhoto, or whatever photo management application that you wish to use, because it just scans your hard drive for photos (and it doesn't use Spotlight, apparently). I was told that it can work alongside of iPhoto, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to use iPhoto to manage my photos, but Picasa to annotate them.
Some other interesting features of Picasa are that it has an API for doing photo uploads - it apparently doesn't involve any native code, so Picasa photo upload plugins are cross platform. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for Flickr apparently, so that's a big strike there (for me). The other cool feature that I saw demoed was their photo retouching stuff. They have an "I'm feeling lucky" setting (of course), but also some pretty advanced tools for removing blemishes, that actually looked so easy to use, that an idiot such as myself could probably make good work of them. And the red-eye removal is just a single click, as opposed to iPhoto '08, which makes you click on the eyes, and usually takes out too much of the cornea.
After iPhoto '09 ships, I'll be eager to read about iPhoto to Picasa comparisons. They will both have facial recognition features, easy uploading to social networks, etc. And while I like the UI in iPhoto better, what matters most is finding the right app for my workflow. And right now, Picasa looks like it has the early lead.
-Andy.