I have a dirty software fantasy:

I want a photo browser application that will allow me to view the thousands of photos I have on my hard drive in a fast and organized manner.  It would be nice if the photos could be sorted within the application, moved from one folder to another, with some basic search functionality.  Although I don’t absolutely need it, a few basic editing options would be handy, like brightness/contrast adjustments, rotation and scaling.  And here’s the imperative, most essential, mind-blowing feature:  The browser is just that—it acts as a lens for your file structure, but leaves the database untouched unless you ask it to make permanent changes.

Do you hear that, Apple?  There’s a name for what I want, and it’s called Picasa.  Ever since I made the switch from PC to Mac, it’s the one application I have lamented losing over any other.  Google, for reasons known only to Google, but about which I can speculate exhaustively, has not yet bothered to make Picasa compatible for OS X. 

iPhoto, Apple’s entry-level photo browser, looks a lot like Picasa—there are remarkable similarities between the two applications (frankly, most browser interfaces are pretty similar), but there’s this one niggling difference:  iPhoto quietly builds its own database of photos that you’ve changed.  And by changed, I mean to say that if you rotate a photo 90 degrees, iPhoto makes a copy and drops it into a “Modified” folder on your hard drive.  Not a big deal, and very handy for non-destructive editing.  You’re only a button click away from reverting to the original version of any photo.  But multiply that duplicate by hundreds or thousands of photos, and now your few-gigabyte library just turned into a multi-gigabyte library.  Worse yet, once you step outside the iPhoto environment, your file structure has been maligned and fragmented—in my case it now spans across two hard drives and multiple folders.  It’s worse than just confusing; it interferes with my workflow.

Picasa, on the other hand, leaves your file system untouched, save for a “picasa.ini” left behind in any directory previously visited by Picasa (much like the notorious .DS_store files strewn about by OS X) unless you ask it to save your changes.  Any changes that you elect to save prompt Picasa to create a folder called “Originals” that stores the unchanged version of your photo.  I have experienced only one frustration with Picasa’s gentle handling of the OS’s native environment:  Because changes to photos are effectively contained within the application, if you forget to save your changes and access the photo through the OS environment you’ll find only the original version.  But simply open Picasa again, and your changes are still there, waiting for you to save them as needed.

This one difference is so subtle that it’s hard to appreciate its significance.  But it is a vast chasm in terms of functionality when you’re dealing with huge amounts of data.  One application behaves like a simple, intelligent assistant, while the other behaves like an overachieving, yet misdirected servant.  It becomes catastrophic when you look behind the curtain and find that the only thing keeping up appearances is appearance itself.  

I haven’t yet tried Aperture 2.0, which is getting rave reviews for being the killer photo browsing app.  Version 1 was a kludge—slow, awkward and way, way too expensive for its usefulness.  But even if 2.0 is as good as it’s cracked up to be, Picasa is FREE while Aperture is $200.  There are a bevy of free, or cheap browsers out there, but in my experience, none of them come close to being as simple or as powerful as Picasa.

One intriguing attempt that recently surfaced is Barton Springs’ Photonic.  By the description, it has the makings of the right stuff including a fairly elaborate flickr browser that appears very useful.  I’ll be putting it to the test as soon as possible, and for a measly $20 this could be a great solution.  But I’ll always have a weak spot for Picasa—Google doesn’t make a habit of charging for their applications, but they could.  They’d have my money in a heartbeat.  I’ve finally deleted iPhoto from my machine entirely, just to eliminate the temptation to keep trying to make it work.