Google’s Picasa is available for the Mac

If you’ve been looking for that perfect competitor for iPhoto and don’t want to lay down all of your money for Aperture or PhotoShop, you’ll be delighted to hear that Google has released a public beta of Picasa for your Mac. Up until this point, Google’s online photo application was only available on Macs through a browser and iPhoto plugin. Now, the same features and editing capabilities that have been on Windows and Linux for years are now ready for your Mac.

With this release, Google says that:

Picasa for Mac looks and works much like Picasa on other platforms, and offers trademark Picasa features — such as non-destructive editing, and the ability to keep track of photos anywhere on your hard drive, then automatically account for new images as you add them.

Picasa will run on any Intel based Mac running Mac OS X v10.4 or later with at least 100MB available for the download. Although I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, there are plenty of people I know who seem to be pretty excited about its release. If it’s anywhere as popular on a Mac as Chrome was for the Windows and Linux machines, then I can see it becoming quite a successful product for Google.

Via [The Google Blog] Product [Picasa]