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Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos (engadget.com)
Google has been steadily migrating its resources towards the Photos ecosystem since the company first announced it at last years I/O developers conference. Today, Google announced that it will shut down Picasa. Starting May 1st, Google will start phasing out Picasa from its product lineup, moving over to Google Photos.
March 1.. lame. It's a very useful photo library manager. Not much better out there, especially when you factor in the $free$ness of it.
Does Photos allow you to geotag and display maps as easily as Picasa? One of the things I really liked about that was that I was able to put location tags on all of my travel photos and then have a nice map of where I have been. I hope they don't lose or hide that feature.
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
I can't for the life of me figure out how my photos in Photos are organized; the collections are randomly placed, and automatically uploaded pics from my Android phone clutter up everything (I've turned this off repeatedly and it keeps resurrecting itself). And when looking at an individual picture, I can't tell whether it's been shared or is part of a collection. And finding any single picture when you don't know which collection its in is nearly impossible without opening each individual collection, which isn't nearly as easy as in Picasa.
Plus Picasa's desktop photo organizer was nice.
I have been working on scanning and organizing our family photographs for a few years, now. I've enjoyed using Picasa for certain features, such as facial recognition. I appreciate geotagging. I haven't done much with the touch-up tools or anything. I'm mainly working on getting them all digitized, not on making them pretty. I keep them backed up on a separate hard drive that's not in my home. I organize the originals into a set of binders with the hope of never having to open them again and just making new prints of any photo that someone wants.
I have absolutely zero interest in uploading my family photos to Google. I don't know exactly why Google wants them. Presumably, as a corpus to improve their image processing technologies. I realize that nobody else cares about our photos. If they started leaking through my Google+ account or at any of the other various points where I interface with Google, it wouldn't be a grand disaster. Still, the idea does not sit right with me. Not everything has to be on the Internet. Storing my photos at Google doesn't make them better, it just means that I've lost control of them.
Now, get off my lawn!
And then they gonna put ads on, if they haven't already - I keep avoiding all their prodding to participate on all their new cloud goodies...
Non-Google replacements, free or not, whatever.
But I hated Google more. (will say me, in a near future)
...for the very reason we love it. My photos are mine and offline and Google couldn't touch them.
Why should my family life be on their servers?
Google bought Picasa all the way back in '04. They sure do like spending money on other companies and then throwing away the work later.
This is great because the important thing is what the name is rather than just taking a product that you already have an improving it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Pretty much everybody and everything Google has acquired, they've pretty much killed off. They bought Picasa, and are finally killing it with a product that has FAR fewer features (and nothing to replace the capabilities of the desktop app at all).
They bought picnik a few years ago, made it the online editor for Picasa and google+ photos for a while, but then over time ditched ALL of it in favor of a handful of crappy instagram filters.
So all of the features, all of the tech, all of the MONEY in Picasa and Picnik is gone. Utterly gone. No legacy left. Google, once the most functional of photo online services out there, is now a second-hand copy of Apple's iCloud...just as everybody was basically complaining that Apple's online/mobile photo approach is damned annoying and nobody wants it and they're all out looking for something better.
At least Flickr has actually *added* functionality (as well as performance) in the last few years. I just hope whomever they get sold to will be able to keep it alive.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Google, somehow the best at being the worst at advertising.
It is one of the weirdest ironies of Google.
One of the biggest advertisers in the world, yet they suck 10 kinds of SHIT at advertising their own products.
One of the most visited sites in the world, yet they somehow still manage to hide 90% of Google from 90% of the people that use it, because "oh, we don't want to overload people with too much information." or some other bullshit excuse.
I have zero clue how Google even manage to survive as a company. It boggles the mind.
They are like a little furry animal that keeps trying to jump in the fire.
Is there a way to download all of your pictures at once? I'd like to make sure I have a local copy of anything I've ever uploaded to picasa, before removing all content. I have no intention of migrating to Photos.
Picasa, no casa.
ATM I stuck with two Goggle + business pages for my shop, One I had for a while, verified and it would shows up on searches side bar then one day magically a second one appeared and it now it shows in searches on the side bar, not the original one. Tired to log in to see if I can merge them or something but its a cluster fuck of a UI with no idea what is going on. So yah that was my experience with Google.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I just today reinstalled Picasa after restoring my photos from backup. I spent some time researching options and decided Picasa was still the best tool.
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOO! Moo cows MOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU POORLY ORGANIZED CLOUD LOVING COWS!!
Maybe they should start telling people first what "Google Photos" is, before they shut down the thing people actually know.
Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos
Capitalising words at random (why "in" and "is" but not "of"?) makes this close to meaningless.
Google is shutting down Picasa in favor of Photos
This way at least you have a hint that "Photos" is actually the name of something.
Title case makes even less sense for headlines than it does for titles.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I would like to add it to my unicorn and Pegasus collection.
maybe a kickstart to buy the code? [like blender?]
I hate how they just ran Youtube into the ground and then shut it down.
...give us at least a chance !!!!
OK that's it. I am done with google products.
Picasa was an independent company (Lifescape) and google did "microsoft" on it (EEE).
Thank you ScreewGoogle!
4wdloop
I just logged in to Photos to see if it would serve as a replacement (I use and like Picasa), and was I unpleasantly surprised! TLDR: A half-arsed clone that misses all the good in Picasa.
My first reaction: material design is great and all, but a clean interface that is undiscoverable (or requires five clicks to get anywhere) is useless. I see my Picasa albums on the home screen, except they show a date instead of the album name (I get the idea, it is just a timeline of photos ignoring my organization). Because a date is so much more informative. Also, there is this thing called Collections - because they added some abominations called Stories and Movies, which are also types of Collections (?). Except that Stories and Movies don't show up in my list of Collections, so why bother creating something called Collections in the first place?
When I go to collections, I see all my Albums (with names). Clicking on one takes me to the page with all photos.The map is gone (I like seeing all the places I've been on the home page of picasa).
They do have something new called Stories, and something called Movies. They both look like slideshows, except Movies is a YouTube video, while Stories is a interactive slideshow with some map integration to make it cool. Except I don't see how I can make my own story if I wanted, and the defaults are terrible.
All of this wouldn't be an issue if there wasn't one clear problem: Google is killing off Picasa. And why? To make way for Stories? It seems like an internal politics issue to me ("Look, I spent 2 months building this piece of shit, and I want it shipped and adopted, and I'll kill picasa if I damn well have to."). I get that some people might like the new features, and I can learn to live with the UI changes. Except that the best part about Picasa (and what was truly great about flickr) was the simplicity. They understood that there was a group that was interested in photography, creating and sharing albums, and that's it. And while you can still do most of that (I have no idea if the Picasa client will still work - that would be a deal breaker for me), we have to be subject to a bunch of crap just because someone wanted their pet project to get visibility.
Google Photos could be the greatest thing ever, but it's too late for that. No thank you, I will pass on adopting Google's latest momentary fancy.
Google can't be trusted as a custodian of users' valuable data. Google has the attention span of a sleep-deprived toddler. In the past, it created amazing products, which I wove into my life. Then Google got bored and dropped those products, replacing them with other products I didn't like as much, again and again.
The incentive to destroy and replace products is baked in to Google's performance management ritual. I'm weary of the resulting churn and refuse to be burned again. In addition, I'm fed up with Google's fixation on low-contrast designs. I'm patiently disentangling myself of all Google dependencies.
Disclaimer: I was a software engineer at Google for four years. Hello to a friend who still works on Google Photos...
The Google Manager that made the announcement is collecting feedback here on his Google+ page. If you are going to miss PICASA and/or have constructive feedback, please share it here:
https://plus.google.com/+anilsabharwal/posts
Picassa has some beautiful and unique filters. Very easy to adjust. I make family a calendar every year, and it really makes the photos pop. I usually post the results online using Google photos, but I like the Picassa editor. Also the printing options in Picassa are great. Google, please reverse course!!
> This is why local storage will always be king. I can be certain that nothing is going to happen to my stuff.
I take it you test your offsite backups regularly? Of course if you don't, you can be certain that eventually something will happen to your local storage and you'll lose your data - fire, theft, whatever.
Larry and Sergey run their company like two kids on Christmas morning. They're initially enthused, open package after package, play with their new toys for a while, then lose interest and move on. Let's hope they don't decide to arbitrarily pull the plug one afternoon on driver-less cars while millions of them are on the road.
What is the point of stuff like this?
There's lots of talk here about Picasa the image organisation tagging and management program, but does anyone have a decent alternative to Picasa Photo Viewer?
Absolute critical must have feature:
- Colour management with support for a display profile (my monitor has a non standard gamut)
The things I like about Picasa:
- Has the critical feature.
- Is lightweight
- Looks sleek an unobtrusive (auto full screen with no window border, no scroll bars).
- Stepless zooming and panning.
Other software I've tried and what's wrong with it:
- ACDsee, used to run version 3. Version 5 took longer to open an image than Outlook. The cut-down viewer didn't support colour management.
- Windows Picture Viewer, clunky and horrible.
- Windows 10's Picture Viewer, worthless piece of shit which can't even render a 40mpxl image without breaking.
- Irfanview, messy interface, very strange control scheme for moving between images, zooming etc.
They post it to make you angry, ask questions, and to elicit a response. When you reply, you give them what they want. Sometimes, it's fun to give them what they want but it's not always beneficial.
That's nothing new, that's copy/paste from a bunch of 'em. You can find 'em all cross the net but Pastebin has a bunch of them. The GNAA is kind of famous, sort of, as a group of remarkably creative people who expend that creativity on trolling. They once rolled a live Linux (Lunux) distro up that did nothing but show images - namely the famous gaping ass known as 'goatse.' The distro was called "Linux for Niggers" I do believe. Keep in mind, some of the authors of that are black.
So, yeah, it's just a part of what the 'net is and, honestly, what it should be. Laugh, shrug it off, ignore it, whatever... You can't stop it and it's just done to piss you off. If you let it piss you off then you're giving them the power to control you. If you let it make you angry, you're telling them that they have the power to control your emotions. Every time they get a response, they're seeing someone tell them that they are willing to be controlled. If I let you make me angry then I've conceded the power over my emotions to you.
They're just pixels on the screen. Mostly harmless.
However, this sort of shit (the history of the 'net - and that certainly includes a chapter on things like this) should be damned near mandatory.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I am also sorry to see that Picasa is going, but I do admit that it has been some time since I last installed this for anyone around me. Why? Because it has been some time since anyone installed a new PC. Their photos never leave their phone or tablets. It is such a dramatic shift away from cameras and desktop/laptop computers towards phones and tablets. For this crowd Picasa is a non-starter.
When I support users I find the old pictures in Picasa, the new pictures on their phone and tablets, even those taken with the phone they have replaced. Google has also seen this. Picasas position was in between two chairs, both technically and with the user mass.
I take it you test your offsite backups regularly?
I know you weren't addressing me but, yes... Yes I do verify backups and keep regular copies at disparate locations - including shunting 'em over a network to entirely different geographical locations - some a bit distant. I can even do this from the house in Florida. I not only do it for myself but I have it configured to work properly at other people's houses and we all share out connections (with logins) between each other and have access to specific networked shares and/or hardware.
For example, I have a desktop system sitting at a buddy's house and it has tons of storage. I can connect to it a few ways or, if I want, I can then tunnel into his network or I can connect to it directly. From there, user controlled shares of storage work. I can just as easily use VNC and actually use the hardware remotely.
With connectivity as ubiquitous as it is, bandwidth so cheap, and hardware so plentiful... I can't think of a reason to *not* have this sort of configuration.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Not only is the name too generic for an internet search, they have a name collision with Apple's Photos.
This is why I don't bother with most of googles services, all of a sudden they've made a new 'improved' services/app and the old one is then abandoned or shut down.
I always thought the UI was so dumb and retarded that it must have been done on purpose.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
doesn't everybody (who's lost data once) leave an encrypted backup disk at parents'/friend's house? i used to, now i just got my dad fast internet and cross-sync our zfs pools every night.
Perhaps you have Google Now enabled and Google matches the dates in the pictures with the position your smartphone regularly reports.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
No, it's deliberately unencrypted, as encryption adds a failure mode. There's nothing in it at the IRS and OPM haven't already given away.
Doesn't it seem like almost everything Google does these days is either abusive, exploitative or irresponsible?
I have backup drives that only get connected to do backups. They are then stored in a fireproof/waterproof safe.
Nothing is going to happen to it, but nice try at making shit up.
Fyi, inexpensive fire safes are rated to protect PAPER from burning for 10-15 minutes. They'll protect most computer media for about 7 minutes. The average home fire lasts about 30 minutes. Therefore, an inexpensive fire safe is "security theatre " for data - if you get the false impression that you're protected, that's a net negative.
They also don't protect from burglary in most cases.
It has been unlimited 16 Mpixels photos in the free tier for a while, both from mobile and desktoo. Larger pictures are scaled down.
When Google acquires an app or program you're using, the time to start searching for an alternative is the same day. You can rest assured that sooner or later, Google will toss the features you liked overboard, keep the features you loathed, and shoe-horn the result into whatever version of Google+ they're playing with at the moment.
When Google gobbles it up, it's gone. Like a beheaded chicken, your app may continue to move about in an appalling caricature of life. Do not be deceived. Mourn and move on while you've still got lots of time to find the best possible replacement, rather than when Google suddenly announces that the loathsome thing they turned your former fave into is being shut down, because the only people left using it are a few die-hards.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The Picasa Desktop Picture Viewer is excellent, starts up extremely fast and is visually pleasing while supporting a whole host of formats. If they're dropping it from their products list at least open source this component.
Killing Picasa is so typical of Google - if not invented there - it is not worth it in their eyes to sustain and they need to invent it from scratch. The only issue is that I don't think that they hear very well - certainly they are not good listeners.
I'm not sure how this became acceptable.
It was the best photo management tool with the most user friendly face recognition and suggestion/tagging options. I hope a new tool will arrive with these features and possibly improved with fancier classification (deep learning based) options without uploading photos to the web.
The Picasa web site works with older versions of Safari, but Google Photos demands an updated browser.
Older iPads cannot be updated to recent browser versions because they all demand IOS 9, and the iPad IOS version cannot be upgraded beyond IOS 7.
This. Not really a fan of GNAA, but it's been a while since they got the first post. And it beats that autistic sperglord who has issues with that that file in /etc that bypasses DNS. So, congrats GNAAtard, you earned it.
i move all my important files to the cloud, where they will be permanently available to me.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
What is the point of stuff like this?
tiny weenie syndrome, driven to make mark on planet some other way. (it's always an XY person isn't it? never a female with insecurities)
I see here that there are lot of people who are trying to figure out which photo/video app to use next. Google Photos and Flickr good products, but SnapsBoard app leaves Google Photos and Flickr in the dust. So, if you are planning to move to either of them, I recommend reviewing SnapsBoard app first. If anyone has strong opinion about Google Photos or Flickr, I suggest them to do a side by side comparison with SnapsBoard. I would be very interested in learning about your findings. Here is my list of options that you can look at: 1) SnapsBoard provides unlimited free storage. Google Photos provides 15GB with free plan and Flickr 1TB. 2) Google Photos with free plan reduces size of your photo if photo size is more than 16mega pixels. SnapsBoard does not downgrade resolution of any of your photos or videos. If you got any of those new 4k videos, go ahead and load them up to SnapsBoard. 3) SnapsBoard provides a simple and secure option to crowd-source your event photos/videos such as birthdays, weddings, or school graduation. There are only couple of apps out there that provide this option and they are not secure at all. 4) SnapsBoard allows you to share a photo or video in one click to all the following sites: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Gmail contacts, Yahoo email contacts, Hotmail contacts, and mobile message. BTW, you can share your photos/videos with any number of your email contacts. SnapsBoard does all the heavy lifting for you. You don't have to move a finger. 5) If you are iPhone or iPad users and upload a large number of photos/videos, Google Photos and Flickr would stop uploading after three minutes if you turn device's home screen off. SnapsBoard optimally continues to upload in background relieving you from baby sitting the app. 6) If you are uploading large number of event photos and videos in small batches, SnapsBoard will intuitively suggest you to use photo/video details that match with your previously uploaded photos/videos. No any other app has this capability. You do not have to spend hours and days in tagging your photos/videos to organize them. BTW, how many people remember the following? http://www.theverge.com/2015/7... 7) SnapsBoard is the only app that provides options to organize photos/videos by any number of personal groups and circles. 8) SnapsBoard provides tons of photo editing and decoration features - filters, brightness, adjust color, add emojis/stickers/text/frames, crop, rotate. 9) Create photo collages 10) Create musical collages 11) Privacy: SnapsBoard is the only app that allows you to set the privacy to yourself, your friends, your circle members, all SnapsBoard app members, or public. 12) SnapsBoard is the only app that shows you the privacy setting on all your photos/videos on a Privacy Dashboard. You can review and change privacy on your photos/videos right on the dashboard, on your mobile device. We want to be completely transparent. Do you know of any other app that could claim this feature? 13) Artists/professional Photographers can showcase and make their art/photos available for purchase in SnapsBoard. 14) Send the photo print orders to your local Walgreens store in USA right within the SnapsBoard app.
I have been using Picasa web album since 2002. I will miss Picasa. All the pics are safe n organized with year n date. Hope the somehow change their idea n keep Picasa on desktop at least.