Is Picasa or iPhoto better for publishing hierarchical sets to Flickr?

Question

I used to use iMatch, then I moved to my own database for various reasons, but I've never had the time to get the GUI front-end working well.... now that I have my Mac, I figured I'd try out iPhoto (I have iPhoto '09). It seems to work very well, except I see two flaws:

1. It doesn't seem to support the kind of hierarchical tag structure that iMatch excels in, e.g.

   animals 
     cats
       Siamese
       Maine Coon
     dogs
       poodle
       St. Bernard
       dachshund
       chihuahua
   

   plus a good+quick GUI to edit them (iMatch had a tree-list checkbox).

2. I use Flickr as my online photo publishing. I would like to edit on a tool on my Mac and then push the photos + metadata to my Flickr account. iPhoto has a built-in flickr publisher, but if the same photo appears in two iPhoto albums, it gets published twice to flickr, and that's bad: the object graph of the exported photos+metadata should be the same, so if you have photos A, B, C, D and set AB = {A, B}, AC = {A, C}, BCD = {B, C, D}, and export them to flicker, you should get 3 sets pointing to 4 photos, not 7.

Is Picasa better at this? Are there add-ons to iPhoto that will do what I want? I would like to get some pointers before investing a huge amount of time or $$$ in a tool only to have it be a dead-end.

Answer 1

I would try Lightroom + Jeffrey's flickr plugin. It's a little more expensive, but it's the best tool for what you want.

Answer 2

Flickr & Picasa are good and I use both, however, SimpleViewer allows you to post Google ads on your site without hassle or fear of having your account deleted (flickr). If you use Picasa to embed a slideshow on your site, at the end of the slideshow, the big arrow in the viewer takes your viewers away from your site and to your Picasa Webalbum – and there’s no code to prevent this:

http://www.varsityphotos.net/brit/brit_main.htm