Mac help: What's the difference between Picasa & Adobe Bridge?

[cheeseliz]

I hope I have this in the right forum, so bump me if it should be placed elsewhere.

I recently switched to a Mac and upgraded to PSE 8 for Mac which comes with Bridge. I used to use Picasa on my old PC and it worked great for me. This is what used to do with Picasa: I stored all my photos & digi supplies on an external drive and Picasa would just scan that drive & find all the photos & supplies and display them. I had a Photos folder broken down into year and month, and then a Digi Supply folder, which had a kit subfolder, templates subfolder, Quick Pick sub, etc. - all with the previews on front, so I just could glance at the preview to find if it had the look what I wanted, and if so, I could open the folder to view the papers, etc which could be automatically opened into PSE. Great, easy enough. I even had the kit previews sorted into albums - so I could find Halloween kits, etc. pretty easily.

Now, on my Mac, Picasa for Mac is just glitchy - no way around that - I've tried, but it isn't picking things up timely, it crashes, hangs, re-scans the entire drive, loses my album data regularly, etc - and it is common problem with Mac users from what I've read.

So, I'm now abandoning Picasa and looking for something similar. I don't really want something like iPhoto where I have to import digi supply files after I've downloaded them, and keep double copies of things. I liked how Picasa would just pick them up and show me them. Is Bridge what I want? Is there something else you might suggest for Mac users?