Bye PC, Mac Got Me

As a PC convert, I was an avid Picasa user. Picasa is Google’s own photo management tool that does a great job organizing and managing files, and it also has a lot of editing options built into it. Picasa’s ability to handle and manage a large amount of images while maintaining its speed is unparalled, and I can only imaging that it would be even more impressive on the Apple OS X operating system. I have 10’s of thousands of images in my Picasa library on my PC and Picasa works without a hitch. It’s never even crashed on me… It works like software should.

When will Picasa be available for the Mac?

Apparently a Google employee let the cat out of the bag that Picasa for the Mac will be available in late 2008. This news was originally made public back in January, and now in late October, there is still no new information regarding Picasa on the Mac. I’d just like to throw my name out there and let Google know that if they need any alpha or beta testers for Picasa for Mac, I’m whole-heartedly available.

Update: Picasa3

Now that Picasa 3 has been released for Windows users, maybe the Picasa team will be able to allocate some time to releasing a version of Picasa for the Mac. Let’s just hope that it will be soon… hopefully before Christmas. In fact, that’s all I want for Christmas. Google, Picasa, please grant me this one Christmas wish. At least a beta version of Picasa for Mac. Please….

written by Brady \\ tags: Google, image editing, images, Organization, photography, photos, picasa, storage

When I purhcased my Mac, I didn’t really even consider what it’d take to get my iTunes library setup on both the PC and the Mac. I currently have a shared drive on my network where all of my music files reside. When I setup iPhoto, I noticed that it copied all of my pictures to my MacBook, but I already have all my pictures on my network drive as well as an external backup disk, so I definitely didn’t want to have copies of all my music files created on my Mac. My solution to this was to navigate to my network server:

Once connected to my home network server, I navigated to the directory that contained all of my music files. Rather than clicking into the directory, I just selected the directory and pressed Cmd + L. Cmd + L is the keyboard shortcut for “Make Alias”. To the best of my knowledge, an “Alias” folder on the Mac, works similarly to how a “Shortcut” works on a PC.

Once you’ve created an Alias for the Music directory on your network drive, you’ll want to open Finder and navigate to your Home directory. From your Home directory, select Music, then select iTunes. Within the iTunes folder, there will be a folder called iTunes Music. We are going to be replacing this iTunes Music folder with our alias folder, so make sure that there is nothing in it. In my case, the folder was empty because I keep all of my music on a networked server, so I just deleted the iTunes Music folder. With the iTunes Music folder deleted, find your Alias folder on your network drive and drag it to your iTunes folder. Select the Alias folder, then click it again to rename it. Rename it to iTunes Music to replace the folder that we deleted earlier.

Now your networked drive is referenced for iTunes to use. Next time you open iTunes, all of your music will be available. I don’t know if there is a better, or more efficient way to share music from a networked PC to a Mac, but I’m very open to suggestions being that I’m still very new to OSX.

So far, this solution seems to have worked for me, if anybody has a different option that might work better, I’d love to hear it – please post it below in the comments.

written by Brady \\ tags: alias, iTunes, MP3, music library, network, share