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Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos (engadget.com) 167

Posted by yaelk from the google-updates dept.
Google has been steadily migrating its resources towards the Photos ecosystem since the company first announced it at last years I/O developers conference. Today, Google announced that it will shut down Picasa. Starting May 1st, Google will start phasing out Picasa from its product lineup, moving over to Google Photos.
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Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos More

Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos

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  • I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by log0n ( 18224 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @08:02PM (#51498175)

    March 1.. lame. It's a very useful photo library manager. Not much better out there, especially when you factor in the $free$ness of it.

    • It is on the slate to be removed. Existing copies still work, but 1) no updates (so an O/S or library change that breaks it is permanent), and 2) no promises that it will still be able to upload files after the transition.

      Yes, very frustrating, as it is my primary post-processing tool.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Would be nice if they open sourced it.

        • Why would they? They want you to store your data on their servers, they're not going to give you free tools that reduce the amount of data you send to them.

    • Re:I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @08:27PM (#51498319)
      The website is what I'll miss (picasaweb.google.com). It gives you access to the same photos as photos.google.com, but has a lot of options which are missing in the latter site, like managing albums. If they transition that capability to the Photos site, then all will be fine.

      But if they insist on the dumbed-down so easy a caveman could do it approach that Photos currently uses, I'm going to have to figure out some other way to present my photos online. I recently learned that Amazon gives me unlimited photo storage with my Prime account. And not limited to 2048x2048 resolution like with Photos (if you want free unlimited storage) - I've already switched my phone's photo backup to Amazon.

      • Re:I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12, 2016 @10:18PM (#51498737)

        It's Google. They are notorious for stripping away useful functionality and switching around entire services for no reason. I don't use Picasa or Google Photos, but you can be sure that whatever they took away will remain gone in the new service.

        This is why I stopped trusting things like Google Drive. I have no confidence that tomorrow they won't say they are removing some key functionality or that they are migrating the service to something else or that they are shutting it down completely. This is why local storage will always be king. I can be certain that nothing is going to happen to my stuff.

        • > This is why local storage will always be king. I can be certain that nothing is going to happen to my stuff.

          I take it you test your offsite backups regularly? Of course if you don't, you can be certain that eventually something will happen to your local storage and you'll lose your data - fire, theft, whatever.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by KGIII ( 973947 )

            I take it you test your offsite backups regularly?

            I know you weren't addressing me but, yes... Yes I do verify backups and keep regular copies at disparate locations - including shunting 'em over a network to entirely different geographical locations - some a bit distant. I can even do this from the house in Florida. I not only do it for myself but I have it configured to work properly at other people's houses and we all share out connections (with logins) between each other and have access to specific networked shares and/or hardware.

            For example, I have a

          • doesn't everybody (who's lost data once) leave an encrypted backup disk at parents'/friend's house? i used to, now i just got my dad fast internet and cross-sync our zfs pools every night.

        • Re:I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Bob_Who ( 926234 ) on Saturday February 13, 2016 @01:45AM (#51499241) Journal

          Absolutely true. The more you get to know Google, the less you like them.

          Apparently, the feeling is mutual, since once they've accumulated the exploitable data, they could give a shit about being useful to anyone. It's like all media that is funded by advertising - the user is the product, and whatever attracts us like moths to the light will be used to manipulate their asset. We are treated like human traffic by the evil pimps who eat us up and spit us out like a spent piece of used jet trash.

          Anyway, Picasa has been loosing support for over a year. The writing was on the wall, I suppose. They just want to shake loose all of the storage now that they have accumulated all of the photographic data that was required to put names onto faces for their facial recognition profiling.

          Google sure as hell is up to no good most of the time that they give a service away to anyone ever. - They are doing everything in their power to profile every living soul on the planet web.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hoggoth ( 414195 )

            > Picasa has been loosing support for over a year

            Let's just change the definition of 'loose' in the dictionary once and for all so I can stop letting this illiteracy bother me

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Bob_Who ( 926234 )

              > Picasa has been loosing support for over a year

              Let's just change the definition of 'loose' in the dictionary once and for all so I can stop letting this illiteracy bother me

              I sorry GrammarMa.

              It was nut a Miss Pelling.

                I Au jus Cun't tipe. ;-0

      • And not limited to 2048x2048 resolution like with Photos (if you want free unlimited storage)

        (Don Draper moment) What? (/Don Draper moment) Photos has a resolution limit? What sort of koosbane is Google on?

        • If you want unlimited storage that autosyncs from an android device the photo resolution is limited. If you want photos to count against the 10 gig your google account gives then the photos won't have a size resolution, just a storage limit. A recent change

      • I like imagr. I have no affiliation (not even an affiliate marketing link on my website).

        There are no charge options that are possibly good enough for most people and that I like better than Google-Photos, but I have found that even the paid account ($25/yr) which is what I have is worthwhile for someone who needs lots of high resolution online and offline options.

        Naturally free is better, so maybe Amzon is right for you, but I would encourage you to check it out if you have a few minutes. You can't have to

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kinematics ( 2651345 )

      Picasa hasn't been updated in yeaaaars. I have a download of 3.9 from March 2012. There were a bunch of minor issues in it that they never addressed, and a bunch of feature requests that never got added.

      It's always sat on that cusp of "almost useful", for me. It's one of the better image managers out there, but all that means is that most image managers are crap, and Picasa manages to *almost* be 'good' (but fails in enough ways that I still eventually abandon it).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mysidia ( 191772 )

        If Google is not going to do anything with it, then they should sell the product off to a new company, or opensource it; there is a serious need for Picasa.....

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nwf ( 25607 )

          Why would they want to create more competition?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mysidia ( 191772 )

            Why would they want to create more competition?

            Because they wouldn't be competition.... Google is shutting down the tool, and therefore getting out the market, But we still need a desktop tool to manage our massive photograph collections.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by nwf ( 25607 )

              Desktop apps compete with Google's main business model: selling advertising in could-based services, search being the prime example. I'd imagine photos and mail are thought of similarly.

      • Did they ever get it to the point where it wouldn't crash instantly if it wasn't running as admin? I looked at it ages ago as an easy-to-use photo app for my parents, but it crashed on startup if run from a non-admin account. Google's response to repeated bug reports from users about this was "yeah, well, meh", and there was no way I was giving my parents admin on their PCs, otherwise I'd be doing a four-hour drive every few days to rebuild them.

  • Geotagging? (Score:3)

    by jeffy210 ( 214759 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @08:02PM (#51498177)

    Does Photos allow you to geotag and display maps as easily as Picasa? One of the things I really liked about that was that I was able to put location tags on all of my travel photos and then have a nice map of where I have been. I hope they don't lose or hide that feature.

    • I've never tried it with Picasa, but Google Photos on your phone will organize everything in a timeline for you, coupled with detailed maps and trajectories. The first time it did it. It did it automatically. I just had to save the slide show if I happened to like the way it automatically arranged it for me.

    • Adobe Lightroom does, but it's a bit more expensive than free.
      It has far more features but it is a commercial product costing actual money.

  • That's a shame (Score:3)

    by uniquename72 ( 1169497 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @08:04PM (#51498199)
    I can't for the life of me figure out how my photos in Photos are organized; the collections are randomly placed, and automatically uploaded pics from my Android phone clutter up everything (I've turned this off repeatedly and it keeps resurrecting itself). And when looking at an individual picture, I can't tell whether it's been shared or is part of a collection. And finding any single picture when you don't know which collection its in is nearly impossible without opening each individual collection, which isn't nearly as easy as in Picasa.

    Plus Picasa's desktop photo organizer was nice.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by acroyear ( 5882 )

      oh, it is easy: it is just like Apple's photos app. strictly chronological on date-taken (unless there's no exif data, in which case it is by date created or last update or, well, whatever, who cares). Plus albums. Unlike Picasa (but like Flickr) you can put a photo into multiple albums without it making copies of it.

      And unlike the Android, the web version doesn't mix-n-match your online photos with the ones on your phone as if there was no difference between them.

      Beyond that...it is one hell of a step back

    • I can't for the life of me figure out how my photos in Photos are organized; the collections are randomly placed, and automatically uploaded pics from my Android phone clutter up everything (I've turned this off repeatedly and it keeps resurrecting itself).

      That is really weird. For me, it sorts them by chronological order. Have you tried pinch zooming out? Pinch zooming is the way to navigate your collections.

  • The Cloud? No thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by imidan ( 559239 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @08:15PM (#51498243)

    I have been working on scanning and organizing our family photographs for a few years, now. I've enjoyed using Picasa for certain features, such as facial recognition. I appreciate geotagging. I haven't done much with the touch-up tools or anything. I'm mainly working on getting them all digitized, not on making them pretty. I keep them backed up on a separate hard drive that's not in my home. I organize the originals into a set of binders with the hope of never having to open them again and just making new prints of any photo that someone wants.

    I have absolutely zero interest in uploading my family photos to Google. I don't know exactly why Google wants them. Presumably, as a corpus to improve their image processing technologies. I realize that nobody else cares about our photos. If they started leaking through my Google+ account or at any of the other various points where I interface with Google, it wouldn't be a grand disaster. Still, the idea does not sit right with me. Not everything has to be on the Internet. Storing my photos at Google doesn't make them better, it just means that I've lost control of them.

    Now, get off my lawn!

    • Google Photos does tagging, syncing, and (best of all) searching based on context and content. It's kind of rad. You still have the photos on your local devices as you like.

    • I have sooooo sooo soooo sooo sooo soo many photos it will take months to upload them all to google. I use a combination of pixfer to sort them in good old fashioned file structures and then picasa to browse, export, mildly touch up etc. Going to be a massive pain in the ass if it disappears.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by imidan ( 559239 )

        pixfer to sort them in good old fashioned file structures and then picasa to browse, export, mildly touch up etc

        I do much the same (though as I said, so far no touching up). I plan to continue using Picasa desktop.

        And, yes, particularly with large-frame black-and-white photos, you can scan them at pretty high res without wasting pixels, so a lot of what I have is pretty large in file size. I export them to jpeg for browsing, and then if I want a print, I go back to the original scan.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I don't know exactly why Google wants them. Presumably, as a corpus to improve their image processing technologies.

      And as a way to improve their facial recognition software, because you'll tag people and then Google will be able to identify the same individuals in other photos. Heck, one feature of Google Glass was to have it upload the photos and Google recognizes everyone on the street. The only way this can happen is if Google has a large corpus of faces so they can identify people in every photo.

      • Re:The Cloud? No thanks. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by imidan ( 559239 ) on Saturday February 13, 2016 @04:08AM (#51499471)

        And I guess I can understand that. But it somehow feels a little bit icky for me to upload my family to Google so they can improve their facial recognition to drive up profits. I don't know. I'm okay with being "the product" when I join services such as Facebook, but I'm not certain that I have the right to donate my family history the same way. Maybe that's crazy, but as I say, it just makes me feel a little... I don't know.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by afgam28 ( 48611 )

        Heck, one feature of Google Glass was to have it upload the photos and Google recognizes everyone on the street.

        No it wasn't. Google removed facial recognition from their Glass SDK and explicitly banned app developers from using it in their apps.

        http://arstechnica.com/informa... [arstechnica.com]

  • And then they gonna put ads on, if they haven't already - I keep avoiding all their prodding to participate on all their new cloud goodies...

  • So...anyone want to suggest replacements? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sowelu ( 713889 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @08:26PM (#51498309)

    Non-Google replacements, free or not, whatever.

    • Photo organizers, locally installed, Windows:
      Zoner Photo Studio [zoner.com]
      xnView [xnview.com]
      Nero Mediahome [nero.com]
      Windows Live Photo Gallery [microsoft.com]
      Media Pro [phaseone.com] (Not Freeware)
      ACDSee [acdsee.com] (Not Freeware>
      Corel Aftershot [aftershotpro.com] (Not Freeware)

      Photo editors, browser based:
      Pixlr [pixlr.com]
      Polarr [polarr.co]
      Fotor [fotor.com]
      iPiccy [ipiccy.com]

      Image Hosting:
      Piwigo [piwigo.org] (free to self-host; first party hosting available)
      Zenphoto [zenphoto.org] (free to self-host; third party hosting available)
      JuiceBox [juicebox.net] (freemium; self-hosted only)
      Flickr [flickr.com]
      Amazon Prime Photos [amazon.com] (you have to be Prime)

      Okay, I'm tired of adding links...but depending on what functions of Picasa you're looking to replace, there are plenty of alternatives.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        FastStone Image Viewer [faststone.org] free for home users

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bazorg ( 911295 )

        I use Windows Photo Gallery but would not recommend to new users feeling abandoned by Google/Picasa. Windows Live Essentials was last released in 2012, all you get from the website right now is a 1.2MB WLSetup.exe that will find the right packages to download itself, and Windows 8 and 10 have new apps that replace Live Essentials. This software is as good as dead. Sooner or later, Microsoft is going to delete it from their websites and users will have to move on, just like what is happening with Picasa.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The lack of good open source alternatives is a bit depressing.

    • Non-Google replacements, free or not, whatever.

      I've always used http://www.tinypic.com/ [tinypic.com] just bloody simple, and of course it's free. TinyPic® owned and operated by http://photobucket.com/ [photobucket.com]

      "TinyPic does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you post on or through the TinyPic Services."

  • ...for the very reason we love it. My photos are mine and offline and Google couldn't touch them.
    Why should my family life be on their servers?

    • we are kindred spirits. i fart in google's general direction, yet i've been migrating to my owncloud at glacial speeds. I still sync contacts and calendars with evil :(. mainly because i'm afraid if i suddenly die, nobody will be able to maintain my servers. i don't want to leave my whole family stuck with a suddenly broken backend.

  • This is great because the important thing is what the name is rather than just taking a product that you already have an improving it.

  • Pretty much everybody and everything Google has acquired, they've pretty much killed off. They bought Picasa, and are finally killing it with a product that has FAR fewer features (and nothing to replace the capabilities of the desktop app at all).

    They bought picnik a few years ago, made it the online editor for Picasa and google+ photos for a while, but then over time ditched ALL of it in favor of a handful of crappy instagram filters.

    So all of the features, all of the tech, all of the MONEY in Picasa and Picnik is gone. Utterly gone. No legacy left. Google, once the most functional of photo online services out there, is now a second-hand copy of Apple's iCloud...just as everybody was basically complaining that Apple's online/mobile photo approach is damned annoying and nobody wants it and they're all out looking for something better.

    At least Flickr has actually *added* functionality (as well as performance) in the last few years. I just hope whomever they get sold to will be able to keep it alive.

    • They've adapted the old Microsoft method (adapted, of course, to make it not evil):

      Embrace, Un-extend, Extinguish

      Of course, it could just as easily be chalked down to incompetence. But it really raises the question: why did they buy it in the first place?

      • Re:Word: being bought by google actually sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by turbidostato ( 878842 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @11:04PM (#51498875)

        "They've adapted the old Microsoft method (adapted, of course, to make it not evil):

        Embrace, Un-extend, Extinguish "

        No, that hasn't been the case because there has been no need for it.

        Look: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is not chosen by chance and it only works on said order.

        You first need to start with something already popular and with an obvious leader.

        Then you first embrace the technology of your competitor so users can move from your competitor to you, and you do it in a funneled way: easy to move from your competitor to you, difficult to impossible to do it the other way.

        After that you Extend your competitor's technology so users *do* migrate from him to you because of the added (or percieved) benefit. If the Extend step is working, after a no-return point you extend in non-compatible ways, on one hand just to follow your strategy from the Embrace step, and to take advantage of the network effect to put your competitor pinning for the fjords on the other.

        Once your competition is not a risk any more, you enter the Extinguish step were you go where you really wanted from the beginning.

        For the most perfected example of Microsoft's application of this model see what they did to Novell, starting in the days of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups with its end on Windows 2000 Server.

        But Google is not doing this (not here, at least): Google was not even trying to funnel users away from other photo albums, much less from Picasa. They just bought it and, since Picasa was a Google's competitor no more, there was no need for the Extend step, therefore there were no Extend step.

        • You really, really, shouldn't have written a long post trying to explain Embrace, Extend, Extinguish without trying to understand the post you were replying to. And I'll admit that it was not particularly well written, but your understanding was way off.

          • "You really, really, shouldn't have written a long post trying to explain Embrace, Extend, Extinguish without trying to understand the post you were replying to."

            So please tell me what I didn't understood. I'll translate my understanding on my own words.

            "Well, this issue about Picasa is Google trying its version of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, which ended up being Embrace, Un-extend, Extinguish... or was it just plain incompetence?"

            Then my answer: It certainly was not a failed attempt at Embrace, Extend, E

            • You missed the humor in the first place. In the second place, you missed that "Embrace, Unextend, Extinguish" is exactly what google did. The bought it, they made it worse, then they got rid of it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by misexistentialist ( 1537887 )
      let's hope they buy twitter

    • Youtube, we hardly knew you (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I hate how they just ran Youtube into the ground and then shut it down.

    • Pretty much everybody and everything Google has acquired, they've pretty much killed off. They bought Picasa, and are finally killing it with a product that has FAR fewer features (and nothing to replace the capabilities of the desktop app at all).

      They bought picnik a few years ago, made it the online editor for Picasa and google+ photos for a while, but then over time ditched ALL of it in favor of a handful of crappy instagram filters.

      So all of the features, all of the tech, all of the MONEY in Picasa and Picnik is gone. Utterly gone. No legacy left. Google, once the most functional of photo online services out there, is now a second-hand copy of Apple's iCloud...just as everybody was basically complaining that Apple's online/mobile photo approach is damned annoying and nobody wants it and they're all out looking for something better.

      At least Flickr has actually *added* functionality (as well as performance) in the last few years. I just hope whomever they get sold to will be able to keep it alive.

      God I miss Picnik. Really really easy photo editing, but very powerful with some very useful features. It was excellent for touching up photos, and pretty convenient too. For anyone looking for a replacement, Ribbet [ribbet.com] is your man. It looks almost exactly like Picnik, has almost all of the old tools that made it great, and introduced some new ones too. The downside is that a bunch of stuff that used to be free is now paid - but given that I don't think Ribbet is owned by another company, they have to make mone

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      You know why it is a copy of iCloud?

      Not hurr durr because apple. It is because the more advanced features are expensive to maintain and used by only a small subset. If 95% of people do not use the advanced capabilities and just want quick backup, tagging, and filters, then that is what they get. If you want more, then be prepared to pay someone for it.

      You can bat that any service that is given freely or sold cheaply will be pared down to what the most people use that is cheapest to maintain while still

    • I was sad to see what they did to Songza as well.

  • Is there a way to download all of your pictures at once? I'd like to make sure I have a local copy of anything I've ever uploaded to picasa, before removing all content. I have no intention of migrating to Photos.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tebee ( 1280900 )

      You can download albums to the desktop version one at a time - open an album and it's under actions, though it does not work under Chrome these days - I guess another bug they will never get round to fixing. Works under Firefox OK though.

      • Since your Picasa albums are also in Google Photos, another option is to just go to Google Takeout, check the Google Photos option only, and hit download.

  • ATM I stuck with two Goggle + business pages for my shop, One I had for a while, verified and it would shows up on searches side bar then one day magically a second one appeared and it now it shows in searches on the side bar, not the original one. Tired to log in to see if I can merge them or something but its a cluster fuck of a UI with no idea what is going on. So yah that was my experience with Google.

  • god damnit (Score:3)

    by jemmyw ( 624065 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @08:48PM (#51498431)

    I just today reinstalled Picasa after restoring my photos from backup. I spent some time researching options and decided Picasa was still the best tool.

  • Maybe they should start telling people first what "Google Photos" is, before they shut down the thing people actually know.

  • Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos

    Capitalising words at random (why "in" and "is" but not "of"?) makes this close to meaningless.

    Google is shutting down Picasa in favor of Photos

    This way at least you have a hint that "Photos" is actually the name of something.

    Title case makes even less sense for headlines than it does for titles.

    • Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos

      Capitalising words at random (why "in" and "is" but not "of"?) makes this close to meaningless.

      Google is shutting down Picasa in favor of Photos

      This way at least you have a hint that "Photos" is actually the name of something.

      Title case makes even less sense for headlines than it does for titles.

      WhaT AbOut CaMel CaSe?

  • I would like to add it to my unicorn and Pegasus collection.

    maybe a kickstart to buy the code? [like blender?]

  • Turn it OPEN SOURCE (Score:5, Interesting)

    by martiniturbide ( 1203660 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @09:51PM (#51498657) Homepage Journal
    ...give us at least a chance !!!!

  • And everything of value was lost. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kwyj1b0 ( 2757125 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @10:48PM (#51498817)

    I just logged in to Photos to see if it would serve as a replacement (I use and like Picasa), and was I unpleasantly surprised! TLDR: A half-arsed clone that misses all the good in Picasa.

    My first reaction: material design is great and all, but a clean interface that is undiscoverable (or requires five clicks to get anywhere) is useless. I see my Picasa albums on the home screen, except they show a date instead of the album name (I get the idea, it is just a timeline of photos ignoring my organization). Because a date is so much more informative. Also, there is this thing called Collections - because they added some abominations called Stories and Movies, which are also types of Collections (?). Except that Stories and Movies don't show up in my list of Collections, so why bother creating something called Collections in the first place?

    When I go to collections, I see all my Albums (with names). Clicking on one takes me to the page with all photos.The map is gone (I like seeing all the places I've been on the home page of picasa).

    They do have something new called Stories, and something called Movies. They both look like slideshows, except Movies is a YouTube video, while Stories is a interactive slideshow with some map integration to make it cool. Except I don't see how I can make my own story if I wanted, and the defaults are terrible.

    All of this wouldn't be an issue if there wasn't one clear problem: Google is killing off Picasa. And why? To make way for Stories? It seems like an internal politics issue to me ("Look, I spent 2 months building this piece of shit, and I want it shipped and adopted, and I'll kill picasa if I damn well have to."). I get that some people might like the new features, and I can learn to live with the UI changes. Except that the best part about Picasa (and what was truly great about flickr) was the simplicity. They understood that there was a group that was interested in photography, creating and sharing albums, and that's it. And while you can still do most of that (I have no idea if the Picasa client will still work - that would be a deal breaker for me), we have to be subject to a bunch of crap just because someone wanted their pet project to get visibility.

    • Regarding stories, they could only be created through the mobile interface last time I tried. It is not that the desktop application had a lot of features, it is that the web browser replacement is not on par with the mobile application. Stories did not show correctly on Apple devices without the application installed.

      The way I see it is: Google Photos is designed for taking photos with the *sarcasm* great mobile phone cameras on the Nexus phones */sarcasm*, and not any of the other cameras people might hav

  • I will never adopt another Google product (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dpletche ( 207193 ) on Friday February 12, 2016 @11:15PM (#51498905)

    Google Photos could be the greatest thing ever, but it's too late for that. No thank you, I will pass on adopting Google's latest momentary fancy.

    Google can't be trusted as a custodian of users' valuable data. Google has the attention span of a sleep-deprived toddler. In the past, it created amazing products, which I wove into my life. Then Google got bored and dropped those products, replacing them with other products I didn't like as much, again and again.

    The incentive to destroy and replace products is baked in to Google's performance management ritual. I'm weary of the resulting churn and refuse to be burned again. In addition, I'm fed up with Google's fixation on low-contrast designs. I'm patiently disentangling myself of all Google dependencies.

    Disclaimer: I was a software engineer at Google for four years. Hello to a friend who still works on Google Photos...

  • Two kids and their toys (Score:5, Funny)

    by ErnoWindt ( 301103 ) on Saturday February 13, 2016 @12:01AM (#51499007)

    Larry and Sergey run their company like two kids on Christmas morning. They're initially enthused, open package after package, play with their new toys for a while, then lose interest and move on. Let's hope they don't decide to arbitrarily pull the plug one afternoon on driver-less cars while millions of them are on the road.

    • Larry and Sergey run their company like two kids on Christmas morning. They're initially enthused, open package after package, play with their new toys for a while, then lose interest and move on. Let's hope they don't decide to arbitrarily pull the plug one afternoon on driver-less cars while millions of them are on the road.

      Going to be bad enough when they upload that buggy upgrade that makes the vehicle hesitate for a few seconds after random control entries, and the battery die mysteriously in half the time it should.
      oh wait, that was just android.

  • Alternative Photo Viewer? (Score:3)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday February 13, 2016 @05:29AM (#51499579)

    There's lots of talk here about Picasa the image organisation tagging and management program, but does anyone have a decent alternative to Picasa Photo Viewer?

    Absolute critical must have feature:
    - Colour management with support for a display profile (my monitor has a non standard gamut)

    The things I like about Picasa:
    - Has the critical feature.
    - Is lightweight
    - Looks sleek an unobtrusive (auto full screen with no window border, no scroll bars).
    - Stepless zooming and panning.

    Other software I've tried and what's wrong with it:
    - ACDsee, used to run version 3. Version 5 took longer to open an image than Outlook. The cut-down viewer didn't support colour management.
    - Windows Picture Viewer, clunky and horrible.
    - Windows 10's Picture Viewer, worthless piece of shit which can't even render a 40mpxl image without breaking.
    - Irfanview, messy interface, very strange control scheme for moving between images, zooming etc.

  • Not only is the name too generic for an internet search, they have a name collision with Apple's Photos.

  • When Google acquires an app or program you're using, the time to start searching for an alternative is the same day. You can rest assured that sooner or later, Google will toss the features you liked overboard, keep the features you loathed, and shoe-horn the result into whatever version of Google+ they're playing with at the moment.

    When Google gobbles it up, it's gone. Like a beheaded chicken, your app may continue to move about in an appalling caricature of life. Do not be deceived. Mourn and move on w

  • ..in general: Any application which you rely on may disappear or change significantly at any time and there's not much you can do about it.

    I'm not sure how this became acceptable.

    • ..in general: Any application which you rely on may disappear or change significantly at any time and there's not much you can do about it. I'm not sure how this became acceptable.

      Google, where our motto is, "Everything is Always in Beta!"

  • i move all my important files to the cloud, where they will be permanently available to me.

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