Google has launched Picasa for Mac (in beta) - free software that helps Mac users organize their photos in one place, edit pictures, and share them online. Picasa for Mac manages large photo collections and helps users make professional-looking edits without any technical knowledge, including:

• A drag-and-drop photo collage tool that gives users control over layout and content
• A retouching brush to wipe out scratches and blemishes - and repair old photos
• A slideshow movie maker that uploads users photo montage videos to YouTube with a click
• Smart auto-cropping that guides users on how to zoom in on their subject
• Auto red-eye removal

Picasa for Mac integrates with Picasa Web Albums, Google's free photo-sharing site, which offers features like name tags - the ability for users to automatically organize and share their photos based on the faces in each picture.

Picasa for Mac "plays nice" with iPhoto, and takes a read-only approach to editing photos stored in the iPhoto library, duplicating files as needed, so that users' iPhoto libraries are never affected when they use Picasa. Avid iPhoto users who currently use our Picasa Web Albums Uploader plugin can continue to do so, although features like automatic web sync, photo collages, and more will only be found in the Picasa application.

This first beta of Picasa for Mac matches the speed and most core features of Picasa on Windows -- and Google will be working on more refinements to the Mac interface and feature set as time goes on.