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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.
Non-Google replacements, free or not, whatever.
The website is what I'll miss (picasaweb.google.com). It gives you access to the same photos as photos.google.com, but has a lot of options which are missing in the latter site, like managing albums. If they transition that capability to the Photos site, then all will be fine.
But if they insist on the dumbed-down so easy a caveman could do it approach that Photos currently uses, I'm going to have to figure out some other way to present my photos online. I recently learned that Amazon gives me unlimited photo storage with my Prime account. And not limited to 2048x2048 resolution like with Photos (if you want free unlimited storage) - I've already switched my phone's photo backup to Amazon.
Picasa hasn't been updated in yeaaaars. I have a download of 3.9 from March 2012. There were a bunch of minor issues in it that they never addressed, and a bunch of feature requests that never got added.
It's always sat on that cusp of "almost useful", for me. It's one of the better image managers out there, but all that means is that most image managers are crap, and Picasa manages to *almost* be 'good' (but fails in enough ways that I still eventually abandon it).
...give us at least a chance !!!!
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...
Absolutely true. The more you get to know Google, the less you like them.
Apparently, the feeling is mutual, since once they've accumulated the exploitable data, they could give a shit about being useful to anyone. It's like all media that is funded by advertising - the user is the product, and whatever attracts us like moths to the light will be used to manipulate their asset. We are treated like human traffic by the evil pimps who eat us up and spit us out like a spent piece of used jet trash.
Anyway, Picasa has been loosing support for over a year. The writing was on the wall, I suppose. They just want to shake loose all of the storage now that they have accumulated all of the photographic data that was required to put names onto faces for their facial recognition profiling.
Google sure as hell is up to no good most of the time that they give a service away to anyone ever. - They are doing everything in their power to profile every living soul on the planet web.
And I guess I can understand that. But it somehow feels a little bit icky for me to upload my family to Google so they can improve their facial recognition to drive up profits. I don't know. I'm okay with being "the product" when I join services such as Facebook, but I'm not certain that I have the right to donate my family history the same way. Maybe that's crazy, but as I say, it just makes me feel a little... I don't know.
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."