viewing images in a folder

I'm loving my 13" MBP that I picked up a month ago but one thing that has been irritating me is not being able to scroll through pictures in a folder. I dont like to use iphoto. I used to use picasa for windows and loved the way it opened up images when clicked on in a folder. I could just scroll through all of them like a slide show pressing left or right.

In "Preview" there are options for previous and next but dont do anything and same with the slideshow. It opens up fullscreen but doesn't go to the next image in the folder.

Is there a solution to this? I downloaded picasa for mac but it doesnt have the image viewer, or does it and i just havent found it?

I have not worked with Picasa for the Mac as it's Intel only and my main machine is Power PC, but in preview, just drag and drop the whole folder into preview and then those previous and next buttons will work like you want and let you scroll through all the images in that folder. Also preview will have a sidebar with every pic you dropped in and you can click on one to open it. Works great. I just drop the folder with the pics into the Preview Icon in the dock.

If that does not make sense let us know.

If you don't need to edit your photos, you could do what I do and make use of Quick Look (if you're using Leopard). Simply open a folder, click the first image, hit the spacebar and then push up and down to go to the next/previous picture. You can even fullscreen a picture if you wish.

IIRC, Picasa for Mac is very similar to the Windows version (despite being a resource hog). What are you having troubles with in Picasa? Does it not look and work the same as the Windows version (or at least mostly like it does)?

Thanks for the tip on using preview, that might just work even though it takes a little more work than double clicking on the picture and browsing left or right like you can with windows picture viewer.

The issue I have with Picasa is when you open up a picture in Picasa it opens the entire program. In Windows it has a similar option to the windows picture viewer that I liked where it shows thumbnails along the bottom of the screen and you can scroll left or right to see all the pictures in the folder.

Here is a youtube video of what I am talking about
YouTube - Picasa3 PhotoViewer