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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.
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!
Non-Google replacements, free or not, whatever.
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
...give us at least a chance !!!!
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...
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.
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 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."