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9 Open Source Alternatives To Picasa
An anonymous reader writes: After over a decade of ownership of the product, Google announced just a few weeks ago that it will be closing the shutters for good on Picasa, a cross-platform photo viewer and organizer with basic editing capabilities. In the official announcement, Google has set March 15 as the end of support for the desktop client, with changes to the accompanying web-album hosting service set to roll out later in the spring. On Opensource.com, Jason Baker rounded up 9 open source and Linux-compatible alternatives to the popular photo sharing service.
Are any of these alternatives actually any good?
Shit, they're already broken up into "viewers", "organizers" and "web albums".
Does that mean that I'll need to use three goddamn different apps just to get something resembling the Picasa experience?!
Will I need to run my own web server just to get these fucking "web albums"?! Will I need to pay for hosting?!
This article reminds me of my experience with the Rust programming language. I was told it was an alternative to C++, but when I went and tried Rust for myself it became clear that it was a dismal failure rather than a real alternative to C++.
An alternative is only a real alternative if it's as good or better than whatever it is that it's replacing!
How about if Google open-sourced the Picasa desktop program? Then it could continue rather than being discarded completely. I understand why they would ditch and forever bury a cloud service and all of its code, but the desktop program can continue to be stand alone, separate from any of the proprietary google services. It's great at what it does. It's very intuitive to organize photos and very fast.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
10 steps to build your own ... ... ... ...
21 days to learn
15 easy ways to
9 alternative to
Come on!
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
That's what I did, and now they're everywhere.
You're welcome.
http://alternativeto.net/softw...
is the feature I will miss most. Are there any alternatives?
One of the most unique features of Picasa is the facial recognition system. Are there any other systems out there that have it working to the degree that Picasa does? With training and automatic matching?
I like the idea of it being a backup of my Photos, but there is no official uploader on Linux. (They also pitch it as the opposite, backup from your phone to the cloud. I want to get it to my desktop....)
I want any organization/metadata added to be present in the photos or folder structure itself. Is that possible to do?
It's not cross platform, but windows users might want to look into irfanview. It's a really powerful image organizer with editing capabilities and photoshop plugin support.
Darktable is a primarily a great Raw editor. But over time it has become a decent photo manager, too. Darktable supports lossless edits, so you can store your untouched original files, and all derivations are stored by their edit history in sidecar files.
I used to use digikam, which has many good features. But digikam simply crashes way too often.
I was a long time user of DigiKam, but it's just become too heavy for the amount of photos I have. Load times were going up and removing the cache and letting it recreate it just wasn't helping much to make it faster.
gThumb is what I use now. Very simple, but fast and easy for the wife to use as well.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
It's bad enough that "shuttering" now means "closing", but now we're "closing the shutters"?? WHAT FUCKING SHUTTERS!??
Just say CLOSING!!!!!!!
But Gallery2 also has been unmaintained for several years, with Gallery3 going nowhere. It still works fine, but one day it won't after an uncompatible php update or a security leak. So what's the alternative ? I can't care less about Picassa !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
GIMP + dropbox | gdrive | imgur | flickr | instagram | owncloud...
srsly...
Is this really the year of Desktop Linux?
Picasa ran on Windows so these, for the most part, aren't alternatives at all.
What is a photo organizer for?
"For organizing your photos, you dullard."
Yeah, but what's it for ?
Seriously, I don't get it. I have a pile of a few thousand (gack!) photos sitting in well-known directories. Except for the ones from a very old phone, they all still have their original filenames and datestamps. Every so often, I let one of these "photo organizers" loose on the lot, and the only evident result is a gallery of thumbnails. Great; now I have double the number of image files to manage (original plus thumbnails).
"Well, you can organize them by category." Okay, how is the initial categorization done? Or do I have to invent (and remember) my own taxonomy of tags, and apply them to each photo in turn? Assuming I go to that trouble, is this metadata portable in the event I decide to change to another organizer?
"Well, you can create custom slideshows by selecting photos by category or individually." Uh, all right, vaguely useful. But given how incredibly rarely I do that, I could accomplish the same thing by launching Geeqie on a directory full of softlinks.
"Well, you can also edit your photos as you review them in the organizer..." Uh, no. Now you're no longer a photo organizer, but an image editor with an index. No thanks; I don't load images into an editor unless I plan on actually editing them. Fewer accidents happen that way.
I guess what I'm really asking is: What sorts of things do you do with your photos that makes a photo organizer an indispensable tool? How do you use the organizer to make your work easier?
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
As digital cameras are displaced by smartphones, Picasa is not needed anymore. Picasa was about connecting your camera to your computer and uploading to the cloud. Today that is called Google Photos and its router-killing, but very handy background sync.
Picasa had a linux version for a long time too.
Yes it did!
It was shit canned just prior to the Windows version gaining a new feature of making videos. Obviously this would be difficult to replicate on Linux, so the Linux version was discontinued. Now maybe it was discontinued because of this or maybe for some other reason, but I believe this is what stopped it from continuing.
At the end of the day, though, I had to ask myself, "Is it really worth using a proprietary application on Linux?"
I've mostly never bothered going beyond just stuffing things in folders, sometimes by date sometimes by subject.
That's because while I've tried various options in the past (including DigiKam when I was keeping a Linux box running all the time at home), what I'd really like is something that can do the equivalent of ID3 tagging within my picture files. I'd like to be able to set all this assorted metadata about subjects, locations, etc. and have it travel with the picture. Having it in an index file in the storage directory does me no good when I pull stuff over to a Windows box, or perhaps to a phone, or push it to Dropbox for simple sharing.
Having everything stored in a single database disconnected from the images is not what I want, and not what I want to invest my time in. SQLite may be a wonderful thing, but a SQLite database containing all my photo metadata does me jack bit of good if I'm not at a desktop system where all that crap is stored.
And cloud. No, I do not in fact wish to store all of my photos in some online nirvana where each can float around on its own little cloud of electrons meditating about the Buddha and hoping to be a single-pixel gif on the next turn of the wheel. I'm not opposed to online storage (particularly for backups) and I know that we're no longer in the age of watching JPGs slowly fill the screen as they download at 48.8 and render on a 386 - instead we're in the age of shitty underperforming peering connections as network carriers and content providers fight over who's going to pay how much for what so that I can get my picture and edit it using tools written in what - Javascript? Adobe Flash?
Give me something that saves structured metadata within the files themselves in a portable way (no supplemental files, no resource forks, no alternate data streams, nothing that requires concepts that would be difficult to relate to my dear dead grandmother even with broad analogies). If local apps want to load and cache compilations of that data for speed of access, that's fine and dandy as long as the file is the master.
And while you're at it, get off my damn lawn.
fencepost
just a little off
A cool, stand alone image viewing and organising software is Nomacs Image Suite. Its open source, runs on a plethora of OSes and supports loads of formats, even several RAW formats.
I still don't know why MS stopped including it in Office. It's absolutely ideal for what my users need - fast, easy batch correction/resizing/rotation of photos for upload to real estate multiple listing sites.
After over a decade of ownership of the product, Google announced just a few weeks ago that it will be closing the shutters for good on Picasa
And this, in a nutshell, is why I make a point of never ever relying on a Google product.
As a company, they seem to have no concept at all of the impact of closing down their products, even when well-established and well used. They do it frequently, and sometimes with very short notice.
I would love to recommend a company to use Google Docs instead of Office 365, but I just don't have enough faith that Google Docs will still be available in five year's time. I do have confidence that Office 365 isn't going to vanish without trace; that even if things do change and there's a different platform in a few years time, that MS will keep supporting it and will provide a sensible upgrade/migration path. Google on the other hand, if they stay true to form, will just get bored of supporting Google Docs one day, and announce that it's closing down, with no migration path, and probably only a month or two to grab offline copies of all your business-critical documentation.
That's harsh, but it's a simple fact: Google have done nothing to inspire confidence that they have a long-term plan for any of their products.
I'm all in favour of the "fail fast" thing: things like Google Glass are fine to act like this; if you don't think it's going to work out, kill it before it goes anywhere. But many other Google projects are killed right when they're at the top of their game, when a lot of people are relying on them. I've been bitten more than once. I'm glad I don't use Picassa, because I'd be really annoyed right now if I did.