Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos (engadget.com) 167
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.
I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Would be nice if they open sourced it.
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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.
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I don't really use a photo manager, just folders of photos sorted by year, then by month / event. That way they are completely platform agnostic. I still have my photos from the turn of the century Windows 98 days easily accessible.
To replace the awful Windows photo viewer, I use JPEGView. [sourceforge.net]
You have to manually install it (eg: extract it to a folder in Program files, Right click a Jpg, and "Open with- choose default", then navigate to JPEGView, then remember the association.
For basic photo viewing it's dead s
Re:I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
With regularly tested incremental offsite backups? (Score:2)
> 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.
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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
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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.
Fyi cheap fire safes won't protect most fires (Score:2)
Fyi, inexpensive fire safes are rated to protect PAPER from burning for 10-15 minutes. They'll protect most computer media for about 7 minutes. The average home fire lasts about 30 minutes. Therefore, an inexpensive fire safe is "security theatre " for data - if you get the false impression that you're protected, that's a net negative.
They also don't protect from burglary in most cases.
Re:I hope they keep the Picasa desktop app around. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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> 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
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> 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
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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?
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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
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flickr.com
Yahoo !
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Why do you believe that Cthulhu would be the greater evil?
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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).
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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.....
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Why would they want to create more competition?
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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.
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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.
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Geotagging? (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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It geotags from content as well I'm fairly sure. It's made up albums for me of trips to Paris and the like when I have used my little compact camera without a GPS - I can only assume it's recognizing landmarks in the pictures..
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As an example, I've got a Canon IXUS 155 without GPS, but it knew where these were taken https://goo.gl/photos/3rfx3K67... [goo.gl]
Smartphone (Score:2)
Perhaps you have Google Now enabled and Google matches the dates in the pictures with the position your smartphone regularly reports.
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I'm not sure which I find creepiest - the thought that Google is looking at my photos and working out where I've been through matching the views I too to it's own Streetview photos, or the thought that Google is memorizing where I've been from my smartphone location and then matching the timestamp on my photos up with that. Hello my friend Big Brother!
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Only it doesn't just work in big town with famous landmarks - again an example from my own photos, it recognized this small French town of about 2000 inhabitants and although there are a couple taken in the centre of the village, many are out in little backwaters like the graveyard. Is this an example of AI? https://goo.gl/photos/v6EHPpvW... [goo.gl]
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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)
Plus Picasa's desktop photo organizer was nice.
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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
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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)
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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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.
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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]
Yeah! (Score:2)
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)
Non-Google replacements, free or not, whatever.
Re:So...anyone want to suggest replacements? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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FastStone Image Viewer [faststone.org] free for home users
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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.
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Good call! thanks.
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The lack of good open source alternatives is a bit depressing.
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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."
Re:So...anyone want to suggest replacements? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lightroom is pretty good, and has a lot of other functionality, but Digicam is an awesome photo organizer. Works great in Linux, ok in Windows and kind of sucks on OSX.
PS. I am quite a serious photographer and have worked professionally in the past. Picassa was always a joke for anyone who took a lot of photos.
Re:So...anyone want to suggest replacements? (Score:5, Informative)
I think you meant digiKam [digikam.org], not digicam?
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damn autocorrection...
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i've been trying to switch from Picasa, which i dislike but use, to digiKam for about 8 years. every time i try it, i return back to picasa for one reason only. speed of work. Picasa does not have many features, but what i can do with photos in Picasa in an hour takes me days to do in digiKam. i'm not even sure digiKam does non-destructive editing yet. in picasa, all my changes are kept in a file separate from a photo and i can export the photo with the changes. in digiKam, i could only edit the photo direc
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I didn't use Digikam for editing, but I am pretty sure it is non-destructive, at least for raw files. There is an option to keep changes in a sidecar file. I used Digikam mainly for asset management where it was much better than Picassa. Now I have moved to Lightroom mainly because Digikam sucks on OSX. If you are mainly processing jpgs,or even raw files there are tons of processors out there, many non-destructive at many levels of sophistication.
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Picassa was always a joke for anyone who took a lot of photos.
The thing I liked about Picasa was that it was über-fast when indexing and browsing your collection.
I tend to use darktable for all my photo management, but it's cumbersome if you just want to browse your collection. I'd love to know of any open-source equivalent that's as fast as Picasa ...
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Google is shutting down Picasa .. (Score:2)
Why should my family life be on their servers?
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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.
Great (Score:2)
Word: being bought by google actually sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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)
"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.
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"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
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Youtube, we hardly knew you (Score:1)
I hate how they just ran Youtube into the ground and then shut it down.
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I hate how they just ran Youtube into the ground and then shut it down.
Nobody's perfect.
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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
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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
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Download options? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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.
Google social stuff is pointless (Score:2)
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)
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.
Unknown (Score:1)
Maybe they should start telling people first what "Google Photos" is, before they shut down the thing people actually know.
This is why title case is stupid (Score:2)
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.
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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?
Any Chance they might open source the desktop app? (Score:2)
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)
And everything of value was lost. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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)
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)
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.
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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)
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.
Idiotic name (Score:2)
Not only is the name too generic for an internet search, they have a name collision with Apple's Photos.
Lesson Learned (Score:2)
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
Illustrates my main issue with cloud apps... (Score:2)
I'm not sure how this became acceptable.
Re: (Score:2)
Google, where our motto is, "Everything is Always in Beta!"
and this is why (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Come on, at least make it a link Give Google's Product Manager Your Feedback on Shutting Down PICASA. [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Come on, at least make it a link Give Google's Product Manager Your Feedback on Shutting Down PICASA. [google.com]
Thanks for the link.
Too bad Google+ is a clusterfuck of mediocrity that only confuses people with an endless stream of goat piss.
I looked for a while and then I realized that there is no way this "person" will give a crap about anything the customer thinks unless it is total agreement with corporate overlords.
Picasa was the last Google service of any value to me. Now I'm better off without them. Might as well stop using gmail now, while its on my own initiative.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, let's all go to Bing!
--
Sent from GMail on my Android device
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They post it to make you angry, ask questions, and to elicit a response. When you reply, you give them what they want. Sometimes, it's fun to give them what they want but it's not always beneficial.
That's nothing new, that's copy/paste from a bunch of 'em. You can find 'em all cross the net but Pastebin has a bunch of them. The GNAA is kind of famous, sort of, as a group of remarkably creative people who expend that creativity on trolling. They once rolled a live Linux (Lunux) distro up that did nothing but