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.

Comments

Open source Picasa

[nycsubway]

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.

Re:Open source Picasa

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:Open source Picasa

[ChrisMaple]

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

They forgot at least Darktable

[ziggystarsky]

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.

Re:Monumentally Stupid Question

[pbhj]

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.