Google Is Finally Killing Picasa - EOL: March 15, 2016

[grandpaflo]

http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/12/google-is-finally-killing-picasa/

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Moving on from Picasa
Friday, February 12, 2016 10:00 AM

"As of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this-or choose to do so before this date-it will continue to work as it does today, but we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates. If you choose to switch to Google Photos, you can continue to upload photos and videos using the desktop uploader at photos.google.com/apps"

http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html

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What is Picasa?

http://picasa.google.com/

 

[iamwiz82]

Boo- Picasa was a great app for editing in batch and just offline storage in general. Google Photos is crap.

Are there alternatives?

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Its is in the nature of things in the Age of Information (informally renamed the Internet Age) to buy and kill things people like. It isn't necessarily about removing competition, but people in power making decisions that fuck the rest of us.

 

[mikeymikec]

They've been supporting it for the last four years? They fooled me easily!

 

[Triumph]

It's not clear to me what will happen to my web albums. If that goes away, that sucks for the various websites that have picture links to my Picasa album.

To be fair, the software hadn’t been updated much as it was – the desktop app may have received minor tweaks, security patches and bug fixes, but its overall user interface is incredibly dated. It looks much like it did years ago.

Fuck you, I don't care if it looks dated! It works, why do I need something new?

 

[lxskllr]

Use Imagemagick to batch process images, and owncloud or mediagoblin to host them on your own gear. No one can take them from you, and google can't spy on you(as easily).

 

[mikeymikec]

It would have been nice if they had fixed the UI so that it would respond correctly to DPI setting changes.

The changelog reckons that the autoplay bug(s?) has been fixed, doesn't look like it though.

 

[drquest]

I didn't use the web version much, but the desktop Picasa I have used for many years and will continue to use until it.

 

[Kaido]

I didn't use the web version much, but the desktop Picasa I have used for many years and will continue to use until it.

Yeah, I don't care for the cloud version. LOVE the desktop version. Extremely sad that they are killing it off :thumbsdown:

 

[poofyhairguy]

Its is in the nature of things in the Age of Information (informally renamed the Internet Age) to buy and kill things people like. It isn't necessarily about removing competition, but people in power making decisions that fuck the rest of us.

Uh...I think you are reading too much into all of this. No one cares about fucking you or me. We aren't important enough because we aren't good barometers for what "people" like.

The hard truth that EVERYONE on this forum hates to admit is that the nerd free ride is over. For DECADES we benefitted from consumers buying general purpose computer hardware and software they personally didn't really like because there was no other credible option for them. For decades we have enjoyed an economy of scale that fits OUR nerdy demands while being sub-optimal for Joe Consumer. The free ride is over.

Joe Consumer doesn't want to deal with locally managing pictures. Joe Consumer wants them all in the cloud so if he loses his phone at the bar he didn't lose all his pictures. Joe Consumer doesn't want easy mass editing and tagging, he wants some magic server to scan his photos and organize them for him. With the Photos app Google is giving Joe Consumer what he wants, rather than what we want.

And it will get worse. Joe Consumer NEVER wanted Windows, NEVER wanted the "responsibility" of managing a real consumer OS and having to know which warning messages were real and which ones are malware vectors. Joe Consumer loves his iPad that a 2 year old could use because it is just a row of icons with almost no easy ways for him to screw it up. So going forward Joe Consumer isn't buying more PCs that he will eventually hate, which means in ten years our elite gaming rigs will be built with expensive server parts as all the economy of scale will be in mobile. Powerful general purpose software will be synonymous with business software.

The sooner you accept the fact that the affordable general purpose consumer computer (and all that comes with it such as software like Picasa) was a market quirk, a mirage, the sooner you can make peace with it.

 

[cronos]

Use Imagemagick to batch process images, and owncloud or mediagoblin to host them on your own gear. No one can take them from you, and google can't spy on you(as easily).

What people will miss from Picasa (as it will be discontinued) is the excellent desktop photo management (with its simple yet great retouch/post processing features) application, which has nothing to do with the cloud. The cloud part (which can be used separately, if you choose to, but you don't have to) has been Googlized a long time ago, and will still be there after this (as part of Google Photos).

 

[cronos]

They've been supporting it for the last four years? They fooled me easily!

Maybe because you haven't used it? The Picasa desktop app received an update as late as just a few months ago.

 

[lxskllr]

What people will miss from Picasa (as it will be discontinued) is the excellent desktop photo management (with its simple yet great retouch/post processing features) application, which has nothing to do with the cloud. The cloud part has been Googlized a long time ago, and will still be there after this (as part of Google Photos).

Honest question; What's so great about it? I tried it yeeears ago, and never really used it. My photos are organized by folder, and on Windows I altered them with Paint.NET(now I use Gimp). It didn't add anything I couldn't trivially do myself.

 

[cronos]

Honest question; What's so great about it? I tried it yeeears ago, and never really used it. My photos are organized by folder, and on Windows I altered them with Paint.NET(now I use Gimp). It didn't add anything I couldn't trivially do myself.

It's probably not *that* great that I would highly suggest that people who never used it to try, but for people who are familiar with it, it's an excellent tool that has everything you need. It's a simple integrated app that detects and locates photos on your drive, import from devices (cameras, scanner, etc), lets you create albums and organize them the way you want it, do some retouch stuff if necessary (with batch capability), and allow you to publish selected or an album of photos to different locations (flickr, facebook, google, shutterfly). It's a little app that does a lot of things.

 

[mikeymikec]

Maybe because you haven't used it?

Yup, that must be it.

<installs the latest version> Yup, autoplay still broken.

 

[GoodEnough]

That's a great post by #10. The tablet revolution really did bear that out. Only 1% of internet users actually create content. 1% of people need a keyboard. The rest have been using tablets and phones.

 

[Imp]

Just some desktop app?

No problem, I only use the online thing to store images for my website.

 

[radhak]

Honest question; What's so great about it? I tried it yeeears ago, and never really used it. My photos are organized by folder, and on Windows I altered them with Paint.NET(now I use Gimp). It didn't add anything I couldn't trivially do myself.

Simply put - Picasa Desktop is simple, yet full of features. One single application

• imports pictures from your camera (auto or on command)
• organizes it the way you set it up,
• displays it in any other way want,
• allows fairly complex photo editing (even batch edit),
• has face-recognition that you can use to tag everyone of your subjects (and later search for),
• allows photo collage,
• create a photo album timeline (a really cool feature you gotta try to appreciate),
• gives various options to print pictures (eg - identifies and warns you on low res pictures before printing), also order prints online
• uploads to any linked web album,
• give captions, or batch tag/comment pictures, even geo-tag them
• examine complete exif data on pics
• And stuff I have not used but know about because friends do - create fairly impressive 'movies', or a nicely packaged photo-CD

All that, in one user-friendly app. I'd say one of the best applications I use on a daily basis, free or paid-for.

I will continue to use it as long as I can; hopefully newer OSes don't break it.

 

[Homerboy]

They can take my Picasa desktop app when they pry it from my cold dead hands.

Been using Picasa for... I don't even know how long now. It's the one piece of software that hasn't been changed in my "quiver" for a decade+. So sad they are dumping it.

It was so basic, yet so powerful. Used it to manage all my photos.
It was too easy to import/edit/share... God damn it Google!

 

[Jeff7]

Damn.

Windows XP's camera--> PC interface: You get a preview of every image, then can select the ones you want for import and downsize them from the camera's native 200 terabyte JPEG images to something a bit more manageable for email.

Windows 7: Download. Everything.
Then after you've waited a long time, review the photos and keep the ones you want.

Picasa appeared to bring back something like the very usable WinXP interface, so just about a month or two ago I took a relative, who missed the WinXP interface after moving to Win7, through the process for importing photos through Picasa. She didn't like all the steps needed to import photos through Windows Explorer and resize or recompress them in Irfanview, either through single-file- or batch-mode. (I had always done it this way, so I didn't even know that Win7's import wizard's interface was different from WinXP's.)

Oh well, I guess the downloaded version of Picasa should continue to work fine.

 

[BUTCH1]

Uh...I think you are reading too much into all of this. No one cares about fucking you or me. We aren't important enough because we aren't good barometers for what "people" like.

The hard truth that EVERYONE on this forum hates to admit is that the nerd free ride is over. For DECADES we benefitted from consumers buying general purpose computer hardware and software they personally didn't really like because there was no other credible option for them. For decades we have enjoyed an economy of scale that fits OUR nerdy demands while being sub-optimal for Joe Consumer. The free ride is over.

Joe Consumer doesn't want to deal with locally managing pictures. Joe Consumer wants them all in the cloud so if he loses his phone at the bar he didn't lose all his pictures. Joe Consumer doesn't want easy mass editing and tagging, he wants some magic server to scan his photos and organize them for him. With the Photos app Google is giving Joe Consumer what he wants, rather than what we want.

And it will get worse. Joe Consumer NEVER wanted Windows, NEVER wanted the "responsibility" of managing a real consumer OS and having to know which warning messages were real and which ones are malware vectors. Joe Consumer loves his iPad that a 2 year old could use because it is just a row of icons with almost no easy ways for him to screw it up. So going forward Joe Consumer isn't buying more PCs that he will eventually hate, which means in ten years our elite gaming rigs will be built with expensive server parts as all the economy of scale will be in mobile. Powerful general purpose software will be synonymous with business software.

The sooner you accept the fact that the affordable general purpose consumer computer (and all that comes with it such as software like Picasa) was a market quirk, a mirage, the sooner you can make peace with it.

I'd say much of that is true but a lot of people do not like keyboards on glass nor do they want to be restricted to "10 of screen real estate. I don't "Joe consumer" is as naive as you make him out to be.

 

[Imp]

Aw shit, I found out that the are discontinuing the online Picassa thing too. Almost all of my photos have been ported/shared to Google Photos already automatically, so not too worried. However, one folder dedicated to my Blogspot hosted website hasn't and I hope it doesn't affect it.