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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.

22 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.

    --
    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 Martin+Blank · · Score: 2

      What fiduciary duty is that?

      --
      You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
    4. Re:Open source Picasa by acroyear · · Score: 3, Interesting

      well, to get us to use the cloud for that, they would need to have their cloud-editing tools not suck.

      They bought picnik and totally ran it into the dirt, where all that is left is a handful of astronomy-named one-shot filters that make me miss instagram, and i've never actually installed instagram for f's sake.

      Otherwise, you can do more editing on your phone/tablet than you can on your desktop, and that is one gigantic bit of what-the-f round two. The idea that mobile should be *better* than desktop is an attitude I will simply never ever understand.

      --
      "But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
      -- Joe
    5. 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.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    6. Re:Open source Picasa by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      well, to get us to use the cloud for that, they would need to have their cloud-editing tools not suck.

      No, they don't. They just have to eliminate the desktop tools. After a while, you'll forget all about how much better the desktop tools were and you'll think the cloud tools are just fine.

      Otherwise, you can do more editing on your phone/tablet than you can on your desktop, and that is one gigantic bit of what-the-f round two. The idea that mobile should be *better* than desktop is an attitude I will simply never ever understand.

      You're obviously "stuck in the past"... The Cloud is the future!! It's new, and newer is always better!

  2. Re:What's next? by thegarbz · · Score: 2

    Tell me about it. This site would be so much better if the number isn't mentioned in an article that is of general interest to Slashdot readership. That damn number would never have happened if bizx hadn't bought the site right!

  3. Re:The alternatives, are they actually _good_?! by almitydave · · Score: 2

    Alternatives can be worse. The word you're looking for is "replacement".

    Shotwell does a lot of what Picasa did. No alternative is going to match features 1:1, but it does support library organization, editing, photo import, uploading (including to Picasa web albums). Basically all the things I used Picasa for. Picasa had a lot of features, though, so I guess it depends. Shotwell was my go-to photo importing tool until a couple of crippling bugs made it useless for me.

    --
    my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
    I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
  4. Ever heard of alternativeto.net? by Nunya666 · · Score: 2

    http://alternativeto.net/softw...

  5. Face tagging? by TREE · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Face tagging? by pbhj · · Score: 2

      I'm using version 4.14.0-wily~ppa3 from Philip Johnsons PPA, which is pretty well up to date. I rate the facial recognition about on a par with Picasa about 10 years ago (my memory is hazy on exactly how long). It takes a lot of processing power and a lot of time to work for me. Useful but not great and missing some of the niceties that Picasa had way back.

      On the whole I rate Digikam highly, having used it for many years, but the facial recognition has never really lived up to the promise for me.

  6. Irfanview by malditaenvidia · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Irfanview by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I am in awe of both how great Irfanview's functionality is, and how shit the interface is. Seriously, nothing seems to do what I expect.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Irfanview by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      I tried Irfanview. I was quite impressed at how it turned a modern neat imaging viewing experience into something I hadn't seen since ACDSee 2 on a Windows 2k machine. The interface is garbage. Some of the navigation and control choices are bizarre, I never was able to set it up in a way that it made a decent effort of rendering an image when zooming.

      That said it does have some great file support. And it's not the worst out there either. That crown goes to Windows 10 which seems to have broken the image viewer for images larger than 50mpxl which take ages to load and when zoomed in on an area will retain that level of detail and interpolation even when you zoom out again. Irfanview may make me feel I'm on a Windows 2k machine again, but Windows 10 picture viewer makes me feel like I'm using a dial up modem getting an image that corrupts during download.

  7. They forgot at least Darktable by ziggystarsky · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:What's next? by desdinova+216 · · Score: 2

    would you rather Dice still owned slashdot?

  9. Re:Gimme an alternative to Gallery2 instead by barra.ponto · · Score: 2

    Piwigo. It can import gallery2/gallery3. My ISP supports it via automatic install. At home installing via the .zip/web installer was fine. If you have way too many files you may need to tweak some php params for the import to work. Took me a weekend afternoon to move everything over. The author of Gallery's GreyDragon theme recommends it, moved over his stuff, and recreated his theme, though I actually now use modus instead.

  10. Monumentally Stupid Question by ewhac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Monumentally Stupid Question by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      Exactly.

      Most "organizers" just get in the way. They destroy whatever organization you managed to have in the first place. iPhoto was especially bad about this. Picasa was nice in that it was an all-in-one-sink app that did not completely destroy your own organizational scheme. It was very unusual in that respect.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    2. Re:Monumentally Stupid Question by pbhj · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Monumentally Stupid Question by Harlequin80 · · Score: 2

      All my photos are sorted by /yyyy-mm-dd-1st day at kindy/yyyy-mm-dd-IMGxxx.jpg So all my photos are sorted easily. I currently have 115,000 photos dating back to 2004. Every photo is piped through a piece of software that reads the exif data and renames the files to suit as it comes off the device.

      I don't use the tag system that picasa has. What Picasa has done though is allow me to find all the photos with my face in, or my wifes, or one of my kids or any other person we have spent the time training it to recognise. It also has a very nice viewing window that allows you to rapidly scroll through thousands and thousands of thumbnails that are stored in folder trees. It allows me to select photos that are stored in all sorts of random location and export them to a folder somewhere else. I can also search on keywords, such as kindy, and I will find photos that are in directories that contain that word.

      If you have the number of photos that I have and the folder structure than using a file browser is just terrible. You would never ever find the photo you wanted.

      So for me the big loss will be the facial recognition.