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: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.

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.

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