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Photo organizers, locally installed, Windows:
Zoner Photo Studio
xnView
Nero Mediahome
Windows Live Photo Gallery
Media Pro (Not Freeware)
ACDSee (Not Freeware>
Corel Aftershot (Not Freeware)

Photo editors, browser based:
Pixlr
Polarr
Fotor
iPiccy

Image Hosting:
Piwigo (free to self-host; first party hosting available)
Zenphoto (free to self-host; third party hosting available)
JuiceBox (freemium; self-hosted only)
Flickr
Amazon Prime Photos (you have to be Prime)

Okay, I'm tired of adding links...but depending on what functions of Picasa you're looking to replace, there are plenty of alternatives.

XnViewMP is a good, free image manager.

The best introduction to storing and labeling photos that I can find is at http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/.

format and quality: Keep the original. Any common format will be convertible, if necessary, for decades. For this reason, I don't see prints as necessary.

storage type: Redundant. I'm using multiple backup external hard disks, plus multiple DVDs, plus Google Drive when all culling, naming and captioning are done. (Google Drive is easier to organize than Google Photos, and you can put videos, photos and notes in one place. Don't be fooled by the apparent ability to make or change captions -- that all gets lost if you download the photo.)

For backups, I use Grsync on Windows and rsync scripts on Linux (Grsync also available).

organizing: Name by date (2015.08.23-name). I've organized by decade, with subfolders for major events and culled photos.

labeling: XnView (http://www.xnview.com/) is best and easiest, plus free, plus runs on Windows, Linux and Macs. XnView can do almost anything. Breezebrowser (paid) and Irfanview (free) are also good and have specific strong points.

In XnView's settings, choose to write to XMP; that way, you'll get captions in both IPTC-IIM and XMP formats, the two major systems now in use (AP and some other wire services also use both). Windows and Mac file browsers can also show these (and possibly something in Linux that I don't use.) You can also make batch captions for photos from one event, then fill in photo-specific details individually. You can make keywords too, though I haven't bothered.

I wanted images of photos with the captions underneath for family viewing on a TV. Nothing can do this. I ended up using Breezebrowser with slideshows set to display captions under the photos in white text on a black background, in the custom form @IPTC_caption@\n[@file@]\n . . . This shows the caption, the file name on a separate line, and a meaningless last line of dots because my TV kept cutting off the bottom line. For each slideshow image, I took a screenshot, pasted that into another program and saved it to another folder, naming each originalname-scr. Now we have a set of the originals and a duplicate screenshot set with the captions visible.

Breezebrowser can also export all captions to a text file. I use the custom format @file@\n @IPTC_caption@\n

Thunderbird, for email, is actually pretty good now. It is a lot like Outlook Express was and, honestly, OE was a fantastic application. Sadly it was slaughtered by Microsoft. I would love a Linux port of OE. It would be awesome. I should look into seeing if it can be run in Wine but I doubt it - it had a lot of dependencies.

I do not do a lot of image management (and little to no image manipulation beyond cutting and resizing). I do not have a Linux recommendation. On Windows systems I have been a very happy XnView user for a lot of years. Maybe that is of interest? It has a handy image browser and lets you do all sorts of things. There are plugins but I honestly have not used any of them. I use it to browse images, maybe move them around when I am motivated to categorize them, and make screen shots. It can do much more than that and is really a pretty decent application I suppose. I do not use even 1/100 of the features I suspect and I haven't a clue how robust the plugin community is but they have been around for a very long time and I use their application as needed.

I am not affiliated and the URL for XnView is:
http://www.xnview.com/

Give it a shot (either of you) if you want. It is surprisingly feature-rich and not at all bloated feeling. It is, however, bloated beyond what it was when I first poked at it. It just does not feel bloated in use. I dare say that they have done a good job with it.

Thunderbird is, obviously, easy to find and everyone knows where to download that. I really think it has improved a great deal over what it once was. I used Opera Mail for a long time but, honestly, that is not so very good and there does not seem to be much interest in improving it. XnView is not open source.

Finally, and more specific, what image management tools would you recommend for Linux? I have not found one that I am comfortable using. Obviously a GUI is required. It would be illogical (to me) to use an command line utility for image management. I am certain someone has and reasonably certain that someone here would profess to like such a tool.

Irfanview is nice, I used to default to that, but I switched over to XNView a while back and like it much more. Just a more polished interface than IView, simple but very powerful batch tools, quick, responsive and customizable.

Unfortunately, the main desktop version is buggy under Windows 8 (was wonderful under Windows 7 and XP), and the cross-platform java version isn't nearly as powerful as the main one, although at least it works with Windows 8...

Irfanview is nice, I used to default to that, but I switched over to XNView a while back and like it much more. Just a more polished interface than IView, simple but very powerful batch tools, quick, responsive and customizable.

Unfortunately, the main desktop version is buggy under Windows 8 (was wonderful under Windows 7 and XP), and the cross-platform java version isn't nearly as powerful as the main one, although at least it works with Windows 8...

Irfanview is nice, I used to default to that, but I switched over to XNView a while back and like it much more. Just a more polished interface than IView, simple but very powerful batch tools, quick, responsive and customizable.

Unfortunately, the main desktop version is buggy under Windows 8 (was wonderful under Windows 7 and XP), and the cross-platform java version isn't nearly as powerful as the main one, although at least it works with Windows 8...

Well, you try to install XnView on Ubuntu then (or FastStone).

Actually Xnview is available for Ubuntu now it's called Xnview Multi Platform.

http://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/#downloads

Enjoy. :)

XnView is being ported. Beta versions:

http://www.xnview.com/en/downloadunix.html

XnView

Pop your drivers out (hopefully doesn't need anything like a clean install) and then install - I know this sounds odd - a program called XNView. You can then PROBABLY use it once with that and select it as the TWAIN source on the appropriate COM port. After that, if it is at all like my experience, you should be able to use it just fine with programs like Yahoo! Instant Messenger or the likes. It is odd and don't even begin to ask how it works. To make matters worse, sometimes I have actually screwed that up and let Windows attempt to install generic drivers or used drivers from the vendor's site that were *supposed* to work with XP SP2 which meant that the stack was somehow so twisted that I'd never get it to work.

It is easier if you have a clean install already saved to another media format so that you can point, click, restore to a bare metal point. It has worked in the past for me and I discovered it entirely by accident as XNView is one of the programs that I first install on any Windows installation.

If you want the URL it is http://www.xnview.com/ as I recall - click through to your language of choice.

• Quality level (approx): http://newsgroup.xnview.com/viewtopic.php?t=10298#37861 ..of course you can't determine how many times an image has been saved at whichever quality level(s).
• Application: possibly in EXIF if the application put it in automatically, and if the user didn't know to scrub it
• Compression level, 3rd-party twirl filter: dunno workarounds for these

I don't get anything for saying so, but I agree that XnView is fantastic. It's a really nice browser/viewer: free, lightweight, great features and interface, and very customizable. It also does image manipulation and batch processing. If you're still using a bloated paid app for your images, give it a try.

I would recommend XnView in the same vein. I prefer it's interface to IrfanView, it's non-bloated freeware and available on a lot of platforms, it can read every image format under the sun including camera raw files, etc.

http://www.xnview.com/

I use XnView. It's available for many platforms. It's free. It's small and fast. It supports many many file formats. It also seems like it would fit your needs with portable database for image descriptions.

It creates descript.ion files for every directory you browse through, a format used in the days of 4DOS I believe. They're simple text files placed in the same location as your files. When you burn a folder to CD, the meta data is also burned along thanks to the descript.ion file. And since they're text files, you could easily make a small script to convert them to XML for any other use.

I've been using it for some years now because of the descript.ion files alone but there are many other worthwhile features such as a scriptable web gallery creator and the choice of a few methods for resampling images.

On PC:

Picassa
Paint Shop Pro
IrfanView
XNView

(Both the last two are good with Total Commander)

On Mac:

AcdSee
I View Media Pro
Graphics Converter (can edit as well)
Aperture

Also Xnview. But I recommend FastStone Image Viewer the most; it does basic editing functions, viewing (of course), can take screen shots without fuss and more.

We don't need another image format... If you want better compression than jpeg then there are lots of alternatives. JPEG2000, Lurawave, FIF (I guess there are many more wavelet based options.) Unless they can convince Microsoft to incoporate the new image format in their browser it's not going to be used much.

So I'll just need yet another plugin for IrfanView or xnview so I can view it and convert it to a lossless format that i can open in my web browser, image editor or whatever. The only place I feel I need better image compression is on my digital camera. And storage is getting cheap now anyway. I can already get 1GB SD cards off ebay pretty cheaply.

Last time I tried Irfanview, I found it kind of klunky. XnView is smoother in my opinion. The Windows version is free for personal use (although the Linux/etc. versions are free for any use) and it reads a billion image formats).

... And I just tried Irfanview again just to confirm my suspicion. The Pagedown key in Irfanview goes to the next picture in the folder. Same as XnView, except if the current picture scrolls vertically, then it just scrolls (wtf?). XnView has a smarter interface.

ZipGenius (http://www.zipgenius.it/) - If you've used WinZip then this is the best freeware to compare with it.
XnView (http://www.xnview.com/) - prefer this to Irfanview as a graphics editor.
Ethereal (http://www.ethereal.com/) - network sniffer.
Calc98 (http://www.calculator.org/download.html) - better calculator than the default Windows' version.
CDBurnerXP (http://www.cdburnerxp.se/) - Full featured freeware CD burning software package.
Crimson Editor (http://www.crimsoneditor.com/) - ultimate notepad replacement.
Max's HTML Beauty (http://www.htmlbeauty.com/) - full featured HTML editor.

And of course nonags.com is one of the first places I check for these kinds of things.

XNView beats IrfanView hands down.

It's free for non-commercial purposes, multi-language and multi-platform (Win/Win32, Linux, OSX, *BSD, Solaris, HP-UX even). And it supports an astounding amount of different image formats.

Filezilla is a great FTP client which is currently being rewritten from scratch, though. The point is to use wxWidgets to make it run on all supported platforms, but for now it is Win32 only. I use it everyday, ditched SmartFTP for it. Never looked back.

And there also is a FileZilla server, I use it on several small machines as well (no up/down quotas afair, so no use for the mp3 server dudes).

Some other freeware I would recommend is Xnview. A fast image viewer with lotsa formats known. Not open source, but good nonetheless. Also available on Linux, though I never tried that version.

XNView - An exellent graphics viewer with a massive collection of compatible file types, and a sweet thumbnailing browser.

SnideSoft IcoEdit - A thorough icon editing application, with support for multiple icon sizes and bit-depths.

WinWGet - A lightweight and simple file downloading tool.

FileZilla - A good FTP client, with a simple and familiar interface.

KillaFing 3 - A cookie/pop-up blocker for Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher.

Desktop Sidebar - A "Longhorn"-style desktop sidebar program, supporting email checking, a slideshow, clocks, quicklaunchers, and Outlook integration.

Codename Dsahboard - An alternative "Longhorn"-stlye desktop sidebar to the above.

XnView
InkScape
Blender
Wings3D

Exact Audio Copy for cd grabbing
XnView for picture viewing
Subversion as code repository
Trillian 3 Basic as Instant Messenger
Media Player Classic, ffdshow, ZipGenius, and many others...

XnView?

The following programs allow to convert/create JPEG2000 images under Windows.
http://www.xnview.com/
http://www.slowview.at/