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A recent post on the Google Official Blog unveiled earlier today that after a long wait Picasa, Google’s photo managing and sharing application, has been released for the Mac OS X platform, in time for today’s MacWorld conference to be held at San Francisco.

Available for free from Google’s Picasa page, the software brings to the table features that are quite similar to Apple’s own iPhoto, with which it plans to compete. Picasa 3 features roughly the same functionality of its Windows counterpart, such as photo and video organization, tags, albums, the ability to create collages and slideshows, “on the fly” editing tools, and selective importing from a wide number of devices, including Apple’s iPhone.

According to early reviews, one of the most appreciated features is the ability to watch specified folders for new images in a highly intuitive way, which offers one more reason to migrate to this software for those who are unhappy with iPhoto, which comes by default with every new Mac OS X installation, or even Aperture, which is currently priced at about $200 on the Apple store.

A very simple movie editor integrated in the software allows for compatible files to be chopped and spliced together, complete with simple transitions and still photos for interstitial slides. Picasa for Mac also features a separate “iPhoto Library” in its sidebar, where the data is being imported automatically at the program startup and even synchronized — although, iPhoto users warn, the synchronization mechanism doesn’t currently work the other way around.

The most prominent feature of the software is its strong integration with other Google services: any item can be mailed directly through Gmail, the slideshow videos can be uploaded to YouTube, and both pictures and videos can be uploaded to Picasa Album, Google’s free repository that allows for an easy sharing of pictures with friends and family.

Much like Apple’s MobileMe, Picasa emphasizes its synchronization capabilities by also offering the possibility to sync any data stored on the user hard drive with the Picasa Web Gallery automatically and on the fly, as soon as pictures are added, deleted or modified from within an album.

A reliable face recognition feature allows users to reliably select pictures containing faces through a simple “Select photos with faces” button; moreover, in case the user decides to use tags in its albums to specify the names of such faces, the resulting pictures will be associated with the user’s Gmail contacts. An automatic “red eye reduction” tool is also being added to the package.

The features that are available to the Windows version of Picasa but didn’t make it to its Mac OS X counterpart include the ability to take pictures directly from a webcam, geotagging, and the ability to order prints directly from within the program. When asked about this, a Google representative assured Mac users that even these features will eventually appear in the final version of the software, and that no feature will be “left behind” in the migration process. While Google won’t promise to keep Picasa for Mac in perfect parity with its Windows and Linux versions, Mac users have been assured strong support and steady releases in the future.

According to software engineer at Google Susanna Leng, Mac OS X version 10.4 or later and an Intel-based architecture is required in order to run the beta version of the software; no support for the old PPC architecture is neither existing nor planned for the future releases. Google previously offered both a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploader and an iPhoto plugin for Mac users, but the software could only be run on Windows or Linux-based personal computers.

We have many Mac users,” said Jason Cook, Picasa’s marketing manager, “and we think they’ll be excited about this. It makes the Picasa Web Albums experience better.”