Moving on from Picasa

Huge pet peeve of Google... Develop a great little application&#x2F;product that pulls you in and develops a decent user base only to have it disappear. I get that in a normal company, the finances might in fact dictate that the company can no longer support the user base with the revenue collected. With Google.. these free services seem to disappear with little warning. (to be fair: 4 years of not updating the official Blog was a big clue...)<p>All that said... just as I was getting used to Wave... poof<p>Just as I was getting used to GOOG-411... poof<p>Google Talk...<p>Don&#x27;t mind the innovation, but it seems that rather than releasing new versions of existing products to introduce new features and help folks migrate, you get an entire new product to learn&#x2F;adopt. I can&#x27;t believe I&#x27;m saying this but... I prefer Microsoft&#x27;s approach to improving their product lines. (sigh)

Ah, the fun (irony here). Before user-end computing can regain a semblance of sensibility we will need to move towards guaranteed secure sandbox environments for apps that allow historical re-use of earlier versions.<p>What is happening at the moment is that IMMENSE quantities of skill development and time is continually flushed away everytime Google&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;Take-your-pick-software-company decides to retire or dramatically rewrite an app. The situation is even wilder in the closed gardens (Android&#x2F;IOS) and cloud&#x2F;web-only where perfectly fine software disappears overnight and then.. that&#x27;s it. Wake up, we&#x27;re throwing our mental resources down the drain on a completely unprecedented scale because no systemic solution to this issue exists!!

Alternatives for desktop picasa?<p>Desktop Picasa is also going away and it is what I use for organizing my photos. I understand the backend of Picasa Web is replaced by Google Photos, no problem.<p>My problem is with the desktop organization. Desktop Picasa allows for one feature no other alternative I have seen allows ... tagging of multiple photos.<p>Does anyone have a web or desktop alternative that supports tagging on individual and multiple photos? Google seems to have forgotten about this feature in Google Photos.<p>Thanks!

I was a Picasa user for several years and I really liked it, but after Google Photos was announced and I saw the handwriting on the wall and completely switched (with much consternation) to Google Photos and have had a great experience. I uploaded over 17,000 to the Google-free tier and applaud all the automation they have built around auto-panorama-stitching, auto-animations, auto-face-tagging, auto-object, and auto-location. I&#x27;ve found that I share my photos much more now, and I also really enjoy having a single stream for my DLSR and smartphone photos (my workflow is to backup uncompressed DSLR photos then upload to Google.)<p>Picasa served me well, but I&#x27;ve moved on as well.

Man this is annoying. I&#x27;ve used Picasa desktop for probably 10 years now. It&#x27;s not perfect but for keeping my family photos organized and doing quick edits before printing them or uploading them to our family blog it&#x27;s great. That Google would suggest the Photos desktop uploader is an adequate substitute is a joke.<p>FWIW I also use Lightroom for more advanced editing but for regular people LR is overkill and complex.<p>I&#x27;d be perfectly willing to pay for an easy-to-use photo organizer but megacorps like Google &amp; FB are killing off the market for paid software by using free software &amp; services as a trojan horse to lure users to upload their data to the cloud where it can be mined for all its worth.

Every time this happens, people act surprised. Every single time. It happens like clockwork, every 3 months.<p>People should realize by now that Google is a company that makes money through surveillance advertising, and _every single other thing they do_ is basically part of a PR campaign.<p>If you don&#x27;t want this to happen to you, don&#x27;t use Google. Use something that you have control over.

The Picasa desktop app for Windows had one of the nicest image viewers -- it was my default until I wiped my Windows 7 box. Thanks to the Picasa team for a great service over so many these years!

I have a question. I&#x27;m wondering why big companies buy smaller companies but don&#x27;t keep their branding. For instance, if Google bought Picaza, why not just make Picaza the de-facto image storage app? They&#x27;d replace their Photos app with Picaza, and call it a day. Something similar happened recently with Songza.<p>Is there any reason in particular why small companies are bought out by big companies and their brands are dissolved rather than building on top of their initial branding?

I hate how google just changes things on a whim. It took me a few years to educate my parents how to use picasa to manage their pictures efficiently.<p>They used to access all online albums by going to plus.google.com then clicking on the panel on the left then pictures. Until one day...it was just gone. No indication where to go now. Unless of course you follow tech news and know that you have to go to photos.google.com now.<p>Now they are retiring picasa in favour of Google Photos which are an absolute nightmare to navigate interface wise. What is the difference between albums, collections and shared collections? When uploading photos I can choose any of those and I have no idea what the difference is. I also learned the hard way that deleting something from your album does not delete it from your photos like it did in Picasa.

Anyone knows a good desktop app to organize photo like Picasa that works for Windows&#x2F;Linux&#x2F;OSX?<p>Specifically there are a few things I like from Picasa:<p>1. Import files to folder based on picture dates<p>e.g.: c:\pictures\2016-02-12\P0221314.jpg<p>2. Import videos from mobile devices and display in the right orientation<p>for example: I have mobile devices and I take movies in different orientation: vertical or horizontal, while the actual file&#x27;s metadata is left unchanged, Picasa knows the _right_ orientation and will adjust the playback accordingly.<p>3. Handles upload from different devices<p>I have a Lumix GF1 and iPod. Importing pictures to Picasa is super easy without any 3rd-party integration&#x2F;interruption (e.g.: doesn&#x27;t have to copy from device to a temporary folder first but instead import directly from the device to the dated folder).

So now we only have Lightroom? I ask myself if I&#x27;m the only one who recognized that Picasa is way faster than Lightroom in indexing and face recognition? It feels way faster for viewing and managing. Actually Picasa is very optimized for desktop usage. I don&#x27;t understand why to throw a good product away... it should go open source or it should be supported by another company for the future.

It&#x27;s kind of ironic seeing all the people on &#x27;hacker news&#x27; wanting someone else to provide a service. Why not hack the good hack and make your own system to do what you need from Picasa?

A lot of people who used Google Blogger hosted images for the blog in Picasa. If the URL&#x27;s break a lot of old blogs will lose content.

Google Photos is OK so I don&#x27;t mind Picasa going away (I hadn&#x27;t used the desktop app in years).<p>While having services cancelled is troublesome, for photos I have my smartphone backup up everything to Google Photos, Microsoft Azure, and Dropbox. Copy the eggs and store in three different baskets.

Google Photos is still missing a lot of functionality of Picasa. For year I&#x27;ve been uploading pictures to an album named with the current year. My parents and in-laws can check the pictures of the kids when they like. The Photos upload activity on Android doesn&#x27;t have a selector for the album like the Picasa upload did.<p>There still doesn&#x27;t seem to be a way to interact with Google Photos through scripts. Search for &quot;google photos api&quot; and the first link is still the Picasa Web Albums Data API...

Open Source Picasa Google, release it instead of letting him die instead of forcing poor users into your identity crysis.

I&#x27;m tired of these shutter-downers! They broke a gazillion URLs! At the same time they penalize you if you do similarly!

Time to move on.<p>I mainly used Picasa Web Albums because of its seamless integration with the Picasa Desktop Application. I guess the integration will not work with Photos.<p>Photos is mobile-oriented to the point that is almost useless on desktop. My photos were moved, but I have no idea if the permissions were kept. All the albums moved to &quot;collections&quot; have a &quot;shared&quot; label in the list, but then when I go to the specific collection and press &quot;Sharing options&quot; the &quot;anyone with the link&quot; is not selected; does this means they made all my photos public? Also, I have no idea how to give somebody a link to my &quot;Photos&quot; page (all collections).<p>Also seems that having the link to the &quot;shared&quot; collection empowers anyone to download the full photos at the uploaded resolution. This was available in Picasa only as a per-album option (and the user needed to have the Picasa browser extension to do so).<p>Well, this means I don&#x27;t have to pay Google for storage anymore. Also that I have to find a new place for my photos and a way to integrate it with (a) desktop application.

You can&#x27;t view or create &quot;specific content&quot;, such as tags, captions or comments in Google Photos. If you find them important for your photo organization, all your work to date will be lost.<p>Hope they will allow 3rd party apps to upload to Google Photos.<p>Hope they will someday publish an uploader for Linux desktops. Even Google Music has one.

I had assumed Google Photos was the Picassa code rebranded. Since Picassa was the engine for photos in G+, and then G+ photos moved to Google Photos, it never dawned on me that Picassa was still running as its own separate thing. I wonder why they felt compelled to redo photos?

I stopped using Google photos the moment it decided that it was time to start duplicating all my photos and then storing the duplicates in my iPhone library where they will be pushed to iCloud and from there to all my other machines.<p>I know that syncing is hard and I can totally see that it&#x27;s probably unwise to let both apple and Google have a go at the same time, but I would have hoped for this not to happen. Google Photos sharing features, search and their automated trip album builder are much better than apple&#x27;s, but apples sync keeps the pictures synced natively between all my devices which is a very useful thing to have.

The biggest reason I don&#x27;t use Google Photos is the lack of a slideshow functionality. Think about it. It&#x27;s a photo app and doesn&#x27;t have fullscreen functionality, which is a requirement basically.<p>I&#x27;ll continue to use Picasa.

Google photos is really quite cool (sometimes almost magic), with one exception. You can&#x27;t put a caption on a photo. (to my knowledge) That&#x27;s ridiculous.

A good time to dig up an old article of mine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocketeer.be&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;google-photos&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocketeer.be&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;google-photos&#x2F;</a> (Google Photos - Can I get out?)<p>My biggest complaint still stands: no true API (which is what made flickr great).<p>Love Google Photos, add a real API and it&#x27;ll be even better.

An interesting comparison, Microsoft generally bends over backwards to keep things compatible and running.<p>Google seems to turn things off with regularity.

like Google Reader, this was probably not a core part of their business.

At least it allows the competition to exist,provide and focus on a specific service Google isn&#x27;t capable of providing since &quot;not the core business&quot;.<p>I wonder when Gmail will be deemed as &quot;not the core business&quot; too. It will allow paid alternative to be a viable option, just like Rss Readers and now Photo management apps.

My wife and I take a lot of pictures on our smartphones. What service can I pay for that will:<p>- Automatically upload our pictures from our smartphone<p>- Keep them private, viewable only to use, or family members.<p>- Nice gallery feature.<p>- Easy to export all data in one go.<p>I will pay cold hard cash for this. My wife will decapitate me if I lose our backup pictures of our kids when they were babies.

Is there an open source project for a Picasa&#x2F;Lightroom Windows desktop photo organizer? Otherwise let&#x27;s start one. Reaching very basic organizer behavior with an SQLite backend should be pretty quick. Reaching Picasas level of polish will be harder but you have to start somewhere.

Many years ago I became so disillusioned with the state of photo management (churn, inscalability, vendor lock-in, lack of Linux support, etc.) I built my own. Have never looked back - I will never enter metadata into a propriety system again.<p>Auto-tagging AI makes me a bit envious though.

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile... Ok, we get it. But, please, remember of Google+. Do not try force people to do something, killing what they use now. If the other option is really better, they will migrate really soon.

Can we have a new api for Google photos please. I&#x27;m choosing between Google photos and amazon cloud drive and cloud drive have a pretty good api.

Never rely on a Google product that isn&#x27;t used by at least 80% of their user-base. It days are numbered.

Why not open source? The 3rd party dependencies can be put behind interfaces.

I really hate it when Google does this and it&#x27;s not the first time, as mentioned by others. Of course it&#x27;s a free service and I should be grateful for even having it so far, but at least (with so much money to burn anyway), they could keep it going indefinitely.

maybe we can start some kind of petition to have them open-source it?

Mobile, mobile, mobile. If only phones wouldn&#x27;t be so crappy, barely usable to do anything other than scrolling some primitive &quot;content&quot; with finger. And you are required to buy a new phone every half a year, thanks to Google too.

I think the closing down is normal in this case. If you were google, how would you motivate any SDE or ops to devote any time to it, given that a newer replacement is already in place?

Open source it!!!

So when is Google+ dying. That whole project is such an embarrassment...

The sooner we start using IPFS or similar, the better. The current web is too ephemeral.<p>Just how much information is going to be lost, like tears in rain; how many blog posts, images, forums; with only the internet archive as a last resort.

I feel like companies that shut a product down should release source code. Then people who still want to use it can continue development.<p>If the company doesn&#x27;t offer it anymore, why do they need to keep the code secret?

I really hate this decision--and I love Google Photos and own Lightroom. Picasso has been one of my favorite products for years. It is simple and just works. But because it&#x27;s not online, Google now hated it.<p>Once upon a time there was a company who claimed their motto was &quot;don&#x27;t be evil.&quot; I really wish they wouldn&#x27;t have changed.