The demise of Picasa

Philip · Post by **Philip** » Sat Feb 13, 2016 7:42 am

For ten or twelve years, I have been a big fan of Picasa as a desktop programme to organise my photos. Its on-line stuff I've used less; I have been *confused* by the on-line Picasa stuff for a few years now.

But the Picasa desktop programme still does what I need it to do. (Google Photos as a back up is just plain stupid, to my mind. But that is a different rant.) My Picasa handles about a hundred thousand images without even a blink. (Besides my own ten or twenty thousand pictures, I have a research database of 85,000 jpegs that I access every day.)

Yesterday, Google announced it will no longer support Picasa after 16 March, four weeks hence. See for example http://googlephotos.blogspot.ca/

Presumably the desktop version will continue to work, at least for some time. Until my OS upgrades, or until I have a crash and want to download a new copy of Picasa. Or whatever.

So I must start thinking about alternatives. Primarily I like Picasa's incredibly simple organisational powers. (It reminds me of old DOS-based "concordance packages" which ran for an hour or two indexing long texts but then produced searches in a flash.) I also like its simple editing powers. But I can get by without that editing -- I mostly use Paint Shop Pro (and plugins) for that and probably won't miss Picasa's simpler tools.

I've been dismayed at the sloppy, clunky organisers that have come with some bigger packages (like the Olympus up-loader, or my editing favourite, Paint Shop Pro). So I disable those organisers, and have continued using Picasa. I hope I don't have to re-enable PSP's organiser.

So, what are the alternatives for stand-alone, simple photo organisers? Anyone have good experiences to share?

Julio1fer · Post by **Julio1fer** » Sat Feb 13, 2016 1:15 pm

The Google guys want you to have everything in the cloud, where they can get at it. You will probably have most of the same power with Google Photos, but not in your desktop, no sir.

Martolod · Post by **Martolod** » Sat Feb 13, 2016 4:23 pm

i looooove my picasa.simple.effectiv.i have been a big advocate of picasa because of it's ease of use.
i'm going to make sure i several hard back up copies of the lates version.

kreuznach777 · Post by **kreuznach777** » Sat Feb 13, 2016 5:35 pm

Philip wrote:
So, what are the alternatives for stand-alone, simple photo organisers? Anyone have good experiences to share?

I've used free-for-non-commercial-use Faststone Image Viewer for a number of years now. I couldn't do without it to review folders of images and batch process/move/copy files. It's able to preview all the raw camera formats I've had except Panasonic's earliest .RAW files.

Philip · Post by **Philip** » Sat Feb 13, 2016 9:42 pm

Yeah, Julio, I think you are right -- Google wants us all on their cloud. But uploading has its limitations: size of files and monthly uploading limits. Either way it can cost to have all your full-sized files on the cloud. Just another way to *rent* what you used to own.

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