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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.
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.
It uses Google's proprietary libraries - which will never be made available, and are illegal to redistribute. Furthermore, the local code is subject to many copyright issues, which are a minefield. I.e. it's not a case of dumping the source into a tarball and making available, it costs millions to review the code, which no business will do as it is effectively illegal because it's directly against the board's fiduciary duty. Welcome to US laws.
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 use Digikam.
+ It manages meta-data and tags (yes my own taxonomy) that I apply to allow me to easily find images and to give space to write some text.
+ It has an editor that's good for colour correction cropping and similar functions (I use GIMP for more complex changes).
+ It has a print manager to help arrange images on sheets of photo paper, add titles and such.
+ It also has face recognition and tagging, so I can access a folder of images and choose nice pictures based on who is in them, or if I want a picture with a certain group of people in then I can find them all.
+ Search by keywords, or by drawing a rudimentary image and doing image matching.
+ What else, oh, when it's somewhere new I usually add some geo coordinates so that if in the future if we want to remember where we were, or my kids want to find the place we visited, or somesuch then they can
+ Uploading images to Facebook (and in the past to other places like Flickr and a private Gallery2 site) and keeping track of which images were uploaded (by using tags).
That's about all I use, there's lots more in there including things like date sorting (which ignores the folder structure and lets you view virtual folders by date) and colour searching.
Tags and such are applied in well-known meta-data regions that can be ported to other applications. In fact one problem I had was that I downloaded a load of image files that were already tagged and the tags were automatically imported.