Many thanks to all who responded. Here is what I learned and how I’m proceeding.
I looked at iPhoto, but it seems to be mostly about presenting photo albums, and short on single picture editing. I was shocked when I started to import a few photos from a selected directory and it sucked in a whole directory tree of them in at once! I selected and deleted all the copies.
It turns out that Mac Preview itself is quite capable, letting you rotate photos and even convert among file types.
Scaling the photo seems to be missing from both. iPhoto has a scaling, but it seems to be only for the view, no way to save the changed file. It looks like you can make a smaller file if you want to email it to yourself, but it uses Apple Mail and I don’t (Thunderbird), and the preference choices don’t seem to allow Thunderbird as a choice.
A Mac Tiger tips book I have say you can scale a picture by using Automator’s "Scale Image" Action under Preview. Now Automator looks real cool for scripting, but it would take me some time to figure it out, and all I really want to do now is edit single photos.
So… at least one person mentioned Gimp. I’m an old UNIX geek, so I’ve heard about Gimp for a long time, just never needed it because I already had packages that did what I wanted. I’ve decided to go Gimp on my mostly open source Mac OS X laptop. I’m already running it now under Mac Leopard. I got an Intel DMG from:
http://gimp-app.sourceforge.net/ (already had X11 running because I use OpenOffice). So I no longer need Photoshop Elements. π
But I am now heading to Borders for a book on Gimp. Hopefully my last photo editing program… π
Thanks to all,
John
John wrote:
I am leaving Windoze for Mac OS Leopard and need to decide whether to buy the Mac version of Photoshop Elements. I haven’t yet explored the photographic applications already in Mac OS X.
I pretty much only use PE to rotate, resize, and scale photos so they can be emailed, but always thought I’d eventually get to its more advanced features.
I’m open to opinions on whether I need (should buy) Photoshop Elements for the Mac or not?
Thanks, John