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9 Open Source Alternatives To Picasa

Posted by msmash on from the to-the-rescue dept.

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.

4 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Open source Picasa by nycsubway · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    http://github.com/gbook/nidb
    1. Re:Open source Picasa by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How about if Google open-sourced the Picasa desktop program? Then it could continue rather than being discarded completely

      Why would they want to do that? They want you to use Google cloud services to do that stuff, not an offline standalone program.

      As far as it being fast, a cloud-based photo editing service will be faster at operating on data that's on Google Drive. You say that your photos aren't on Google Drive? Well then you need to put them all on there. You're not supposed to be storing your personal information on your own local machine, you're supposed to be storing everything in the Cloud.

      It makes perfect sense that Google is killing off Picasa and not making the source code available.

    2. Re:Open source Picasa by ChrisMaple · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They'd do it to generate good will, which is wearing thin on the Google brand.

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    3. Re:Open source Picasa by KGIII · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Apparently not.

      Well, no... The goodwill is wearing thin. Them doing something like that to garner goodwill does not seem to be likely.

      Gotta be frank, I really don't think Google gives a shit any more. They've got what they want and they're now huge. They're no longer nimble. They're no longer worried about a future. They went from having a six month plan to having a fifteen year plan. A few broken eggs along the way, when we humans are such shortsighted fools with attention deficit, means little to them in the grand scheme of things.

      Hopefully, I'm completely wrong.

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      "So long and thanks for all the fish."