Google Releases Picasa for Linux

chrisd writes "Hi, everyone. Today I'm pleased to announce that we're making Picasa, our photo management application, available for Linux. This is a pre-beta labs release and since we're still learning on how to best make software for Linux, we're asking that you submit your bugs as you find them. Picasa for Linux uses Wine internally; this shows a bit in the interface, but it works even better than we had hoped. Download it and check it out! A list of supported distributions can be found in the FAQ. We hope our patches to Wine will help make it easier for everyone to run Windows apps on Linux and other Unix-like systems. Thanks to our pals at CodeWeavers who did much of the heavy lifting, and to Marcus Meissner, whose libgphoto support patch was a welcome surprise."

Comments

Files available in US only (apparantly)

[LiquidCoooled]

So, use coral as your proxy :)

http://picasa.google.com.nyud.net:8080/linux/
http://picasa.google.com.nyud.net:8080/linux/faq.h tml

Chris, looks good so far, big thanks.

Re:Why US only?

[Tab is on Slashdot]

You can get the binaries directly (regardless of location) from these links:

Deb: http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/pic asa/picasa_2.2.2820-5_i386.deb

RPM: http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/i386/picasa- 2.2.2820-5.i386.rpm

Binary installer: http://dl.google.com/linux/standalone/picasa-2.2.2 820-5.i386.bin

Re:not free

[root_42]

And while we're at it. There is a free alternative. It has even got all the spiffy KDE features like ioslaves and so on at its hands. Plus all the cameras supported that gphoto2 has.

Re:suprise?

[Bungopolis]

libgphoto is an OSS library for interfacing with digital cameras. Marcus Meissner is a major Wine developer. Presumably, he wrote a patch that integrates libgphoto with Wine, thus enabling Picassa to download photos from digital cameras - a neccessary feature that would not have otherwise been available as part of the Wine API.

Re:not free

[Bungopolis]

It should further be noted that Google in the process of porting Picasa to Linux participated in committing a number of patches back into the Wine source, as can be seen here.

First impressions

[kkiller]

Well it works.... just like the Windows version. With the exception of slightly crummy looking fonts in the menus, the interface is quite slick and near-identical to the original, and appears to be as fast and slick as the original. Nice job.

One or two problems remain (and I'm sure more will pop up after I play with it for more than 10 minutes). It doesn't integrate into any desktop environment at all - its very much a Windows application hacked to bits so it runs smoothly in Linux, and it shows at points. With the exception of Desktop, it does not remember stored folders from either Konqueror or Nautilus, and maintains meaningless links to "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Music" and other folders which don't exist in the file requesters. This could use some work.

Re:not free

[N Monkey]

Typical Linux whine. No where in this annoucement do they say that they are releasing Picasa as open source software. They do allow use of it free of charge. Software developers are really in a bind with Linux. If you don't create software for Linux, Linux people whine that you are not supporting them. Create software for Linux, Linux people whine that its not open source.

Actually, it sounds like there should be enough to even stop the latter from moaning. According to the WINE home page:

Google just released Picasa for Linux. .... Interestingly, there's some technical details available about how the Linux version came to be. The port was done using Wine and in the process over 200 patches were contributed back to the Wine project.

Re:wow

[anandrajan]

According to Brian Proffitt on Linux Today, when asked if additions to WINE could help porting Google Earth, DiBona said that Google Earth uses Qt and GL and so additional WINE support would not help.

Re:Recommendation

[jeremy_white]

Well, now that Google has sponsored so much work on Wine, yes you can just use Wine to run Picasa, and that will work very nicely.

Of course, the Picasa for Linux product is far more tailored for Linux than that would be; it doesn't give you drive letters, it knows how to integrate into your file system, it knows how to connect to your desktop environment; it has a whole raft of other Linux specific features. I think it's even reasonable to hope that as it matures, it will become even more fully tailored to Linux.

But the bottom line is simple - try it. You may be surprised at how handy it is. And today you have one more application on Linux than you had yesterday. I'm not sure how anyone can be upset by that.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Re:suprise?

[Bungopolis]

Many digital cameras do not support a mass storage mode as you describe and can only operate using the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP), which also supports some more advanced features like remote-shooting (but Picasa doesn't support any of those). For this reason, libgphoto is very useful for Picasa because it provides the PTP communication layer that enables support for a much wider array of cameras.

Re:story title wrong.

[Tab is on Slashdot]

Stop it.

Google has indeed been working on Picasa, and it's finally available for download at http://labs.google.com/ For the curious, here are a few tidbits about how it came to be. When Google wanted to port Picasa to Linux, they faced a problem: the Picasa team was busy working on new projects, and having them also do a native port would have taken a while. As an experiment, Google decided to give Wine a try. A quick look showed that much of Picasa already worked, but key features were missing: the IWebBrowser API, SSL, scanner/camera support, removable media notification (so you can insert a flash drive and have Windows notice it right away), and change notification (so Windows can notify apps when new files are created), among others. Fortunately, Wine was already halfway to having an implementation of IWebBrowser thanks to Jacek Caban's Summer of Code 2005 project. And all that other stuff couldn't be *that* hard, right? :-) So Google engaged Codeweavers to add those features and fix any other bugs. This resulted in tons of improvements to Wine (see the list at code.google.com/wine.html), all of which are now in the public tree at winehq.org. Many people assume that when porting a Windows app to Linux using Wine, the best thing to do is link Winelib into the application to create a native Linux application. Not so! It's just as effective, and a heck of a lot easier, to run the same binary on both Windows and Wine. So that's what the Picasa team did. Picasa for Linux uses slightly different text messages, but the .exe file is identical for both Windows and Linux.

http://www.winehq.com/pipermail/wine-devel/2006-Ma y/047806.html In short, we would have eventually gotten a non-wine version. It would have probably been much further away, and much less feature-complete. We're the infintesimal minority here. We have to take things like this and run with them.

None do

[HalAtWork]

A lot of applications don't really integrate well into the desktop, there's not much new about that. But people still use them. They all have to use their own widgets. QuickTime, MSOffice, WinAMP, MusicMatch JukeBox, Windows Media Player... even PhotoShop doesn't integrate well in Windows, FireFox struggles to integrate well with desktop environments other than Gnome (but is doing a better job than most cross-platform apps), etc...

Re:What are you smoking?

[14CharUsername]

Let's see...
Windows version
md5sum Picasa.exe:
b8806a095619d3327e7e415af8b72d48 *Picasa2.exe

Linux version
md5sum /opt/picasa/wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Picasa2/Picasa2.exe
b8806a095619d3327e7e415af8b72d48 /opt/picasa/wine/drive_c/Program Files/Picasa2/Picasa2.exe

Yeah, its pretty much the same.

Poorly designed

[GRW]

I am not impressed. I installed this thing and it tells me that my pictures are located in Y:\pics instead of ~/pics. Also, it is too stupid to realize that the simlink on the desktop is the same directory and it indexes everything twice. Stupid!

Re:suprise?

[Marcus Meissner]

There are cameras that do not support Mass Storage. Notably the Canon cameras for instance (PowerShot, Digital IXUS, et.al.) and others.

Second, Windows has several methods to interface with digital cameras. One of the is direct filesystem access (works just fine). The second is TWAIN. Originally just for scanners it is also used for digital cameras. On third, WIA (Windows Imaging Architecture).

WINE already had a TWAIN implementation (written by Corel during WordPerfect 2000 times) but it was only able to use SANE, and not really able to use libgphoto2 in a good way.

So what I did was to just add the lowlevel libgphoto TWAIN driver to WINE, and CodeWeavers provided a gphoto Import GUI for it. My part of work was small compared to the stuff the CodeWeavers people did.

Voila - importing from any kind of cameras into Picasa.

Btw, I think all of this is in regular WINE 0.9.14.

Ciao, Marcus

Re:not free

[jrockway]

From TFA, http://picasa.google.com/linux/faq.html:

Q: Why doesn't sound play during the slideshow?

For licensing reasons, we were concerned about distributing code to play MP3 files.

In a future release, however, we hope to provide an interface for you to select your own MP3-playing software.

Fuck MP3, then. Use Vorbis, which is Free of royalties, patents, etc.

Q: Why are movie files so big?

Due to licensing issues with movie codecs, we can't include a motion-compressing codec for making movies. As a result, we can only produce movies that are uncompressed.

If you can obtain a license to use a better codec on your Linux system, we recommend that you use that licensed software to compress the resulting movie files; they should drastically drop in size with any such codec.

Fuck video codecs that require licensing, then. Use Theora, which is Free of royalties, patents, etc. :)

All in all, Google didn't do their homework here, I think. There are plenty of ways to overcome the mentioned restrictions. If it were open source, I'd write the patch myself.

Sadly, it's all closed up, and is useless to everybody. Too bad.