16 ms·

Moving on from Picasa

209 points by mvgoogler 11y ago

tmaly 11y ago
like Google Reader, this was probably not a core part of their business.
- Alex3917 11y ago
  Google Reader should have been though. If they have used that as the core of Google+ then it could have had a shot at becoming the next Facebook.
- nikolay 11y ago
  And what's their core part? Self-driving cars?
  - baldfat 11y ago
    I would put it this way. Google Photos blows away Picasa Web Albums and Imgur is a better host. It was dead as Flickr will be in the next year or so sadly.
    - nikolay 11y ago
      I understand that, but they broke the web by killing it.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    Advertising. If it doesn't relate to advertising or have some ad revenue channel, don't expect it to stick around for long.
    - nikolay 11y ago
      ... but it could be. They still can serve ads there!
  - frewsxcv 11y ago
    Beside the point, but isn't the self-driving car project under Alphabet and not Google?
    - nikolay 11y ago
      I was being sarcastic...
- daave 11y ago
  Unlike Google Reader, this product was replaced with a newer (and, IMO, better) alternative, Google Photos. Albums you had in Picasa aren't gone, they're just accessible through the new UI. Why should Google maintain two competing UIs for the same product? [these opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer, Google]
  - danieldk 11y ago
    Albums you had in Picasa aren't gone, they're just accessible through the new UI. Well, except that some photos do not show up in Photos and only in Picasa Albums (e.g. images shared through Hangouts). Also, Picasa had a lot more photo management features.
  - nadgob 11y ago
    I used Picasa to organize my photos offline, so Photos is in no way a replacement. Are there any plans to open source the desktop application?
nikolay 11y ago
I'm tired of these shutter-downers! They broke a gazillion URLs! At the same time they penalize you if you do similarly!
- enf 11y ago
  The old URLs redirect as far as I can tell.
  - nikolay 11y ago
    Are you sure? This is great news then!
- mvgoogler 11y ago
  Where do you get the impression that "a gazillion URLs" broke? Picasa Web Albums will continue working until the album archive view is ready. Also, all of the photo from PWA are hosted in Google Photos Backend - and will continue to be hosted there. There are accessible in Google Photos and the URLs will continue to work. If you haven't seen it, the original blog post has better information than the linked article: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-pica...
NathanKP 11y ago
A lot of people who used Google Blogger hosted images for the blog in Picasa. If the URL's break a lot of old blogs will lose content.
- nikolay 11y ago
  Yeah, but maybe Blogger is next in line!
  - mintplant 11y ago
    The only thing keeping Blogger alive is probably that Google uses it for their own blogs.
    - nikolay 11y ago
      Yeah, I thought the same, but they would move to Google+ Pages.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- mvgoogler 11y ago
  The blogger photo are still there and hosted in Google Photos Backend. The urls will continue to work.
pgrote 11y ago
Alternatives for desktop picasa? Desktop Picasa is also going away and it is what I use for organizing my photos. I understand the backend of Picasa Web is replaced by Google Photos, no problem. My problem is with the desktop organization. Desktop Picasa allows for one feature no other alternative I have seen allows ... tagging of multiple photos. Does anyone have a web or desktop alternative that supports tagging on individual and multiple photos? Google seems to have forgotten about this feature in Google Photos. Thanks!
- deanCommie 11y ago
  I mean it's going away insofar as they are no longer supporting it. However they haven't put out features in years. If it works for you, keep using it. It's what I do. Unless it's sync functionality stops working with Google Photos, I guess, which would be undesireable...
- stevesearer 11y ago
  I use Picasa on the desktop to organize my photos as well. While they are not going to develop it any more, it should still work if you have it installed right?
  - pgrote 11y ago
    You are correct from what I read and understand. My concern is that one day something will stop working with desktop picasa and the Google Photos backend. I'd like to find something to move to so when the inevitable happens I am don't have to worry.
    - mikecb 11y ago
      There's a desktop uploader that you might be able to point at the picasa folder, or just throw pics at it and then organize on the web.
- GBond 11y ago
  I also would like to know if others have suggestions. I've tired Apple Photo/iPhoto/Aperture and Capture One. I find they have severe performance or usability issues.
al_biglan 11y ago
Huge pet peeve of Google... Develop a great little application/product that pulls you in and develops a decent user base only to have it disappear. I get that in a normal company, the finances might in fact dictate that the company can no longer support the user base with the revenue collected. With Google.. these free services seem to disappear with little warning. (to be fair: 4 years of not updating the official Blog was a big clue...) All that said... just as I was getting used to Wave... poof Just as I was getting used to GOOG-411... poof Google Talk... Don't mind the innovation, but it seems that rather than releasing new versions of existing products to introduce new features and help folks migrate, you get an entire new product to learn/adopt. I can't believe I'm saying this but... I prefer Microsoft's approach to improving their product lines. (sigh)
- notatoad 11y ago
  Picasa web albums has hardly disappeared. It was replaced by Google Photos (then Google+ photos) a couple years ago. They left the old interface around for years to allow people to transition over at their own pace, you can't really expect a better migration path than that.
  - Sanddancer 11y ago
    Google photos doesn't have a desktop app. Being able to sort pics on a desktop is just as important, if not moreso, as being able to sort pics on the web. Not everything needs to be, nor should be, a pure webapp.
    - jbob2000 11y ago
      That's kind of Google's modus operandi though, isn't it? They don't make desktop apps unless there is a distinct need for it (Google Earth, for example). They are all about the web!
      - CaptSpify 11y ago
        I think that's the complaint though: Why take a perfectly fine working desktop application, move it to the web, then remove the desktop side? Presumably, if I wanted the web version, I would have started with the web version.
signal11 11y ago
The Picasa desktop app for Windows had one of the nicest image viewers -- it was my default until I wiped my Windows 7 box. Thanks to the Picasa team for a great service over so many these years!
ungzd 11y ago
Mobile, mobile, mobile. If only phones wouldn't be so crappy, barely usable to do anything other than scrolling some primitive "content" with finger. And you are required to buy a new phone every half a year, thanks to Google too.
kensai 11y ago
I really hate it when Google does this and it's not the first time, as mentioned by others. Of course it's a free service and I should be grateful for even having it so far, but at least (with so much money to burn anyway), they could keep it going indefinitely.
- VikingCoder 11y ago
  If Google kept useless things that nobody used running indefinitely, they'd run out of money eventually and then they'd be Yahoo!
  - anexprogrammer 11y ago
    Picasa is hardly useless, and fills a spot I can't think of a direct equivalent I can use to replace it. Google talk was perfect, light weight and pleasingly free of the cruft and crap that alternatives like skype insist on loading themselves with. Now replaced by hangouts which has an appalling visual design, and has no desktop app (No, I don't always have my browser open, or want to). Google Reader... etc. The list is getting horribly long for killed things that are neither useless, or little used. Oh, and it seems like a little while before they run out of money. I imagine they could keep Picasa and talk supported and hosted until the heat death of the universe, and still have a few pennies in the bank.
kevinsd 11y ago
I think the closing down is normal in this case. If you were google, how would you motivate any SDE or ops to devote any time to it, given that a newer replacement is already in place?
miahi 11y ago
Time to move on. I mainly used Picasa Web Albums because of its seamless integration with the Picasa Desktop Application. I guess the integration will not work with Photos. Photos is mobile-oriented to the point that is almost useless on desktop. My photos were moved, but I have no idea if the permissions were kept. All the albums moved to "collections" have a "shared" label in the list, but then when I go to the specific collection and press "Sharing options" the "anyone with the link" is not selected; does this means they made all my photos public? Also, I have no idea how to give somebody a link to my "Photos" page (all collections). Also seems that having the link to the "shared" collection empowers anyone to download the full photos at the uploaded resolution. This was available in Picasa only as a per-album option (and the user needed to have the Picasa browser extension to do so). Well, this means I don't have to pay Google for storage anymore. Also that I have to find a new place for my photos and a way to integrate it with (a) desktop application.
- danieldk 11y ago
  The whole Google Photo infrastructure has other weirdnesses. Photos/images that I share with Hangouts don't show up in Google Photos. Previously I could remove them with Google+ Photos, but since that was shut down, I used Picasa web albums to remove Hangouts images. Another interesting thing that I noticed is that some photos are not added to Google Drive if you upload them to Google Photos and have the Google Drive functionality enabled. Turns out it's exactly the photos that I already shared with Hangouts. Their whole photo story is a mess.
ooo000ooo 11y ago
The sooner we start using IPFS or similar, the better. The current web is too ephemeral. Just how much information is going to be lost, like tears in rain; how many blog posts, images, forums; with only the internet archive as a last resort.
deleted 11y ago
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nattaylor 11y ago
I was a Picasa user for several years and I really liked it, but after Google Photos was announced and I saw the handwriting on the wall and completely switched (with much consternation) to Google Photos and have had a great experience. I uploaded over 17,000 to the Google-free tier and applaud all the automation they have built around auto-panorama-stitching, auto-animations, auto-face-tagging, auto-object, and auto-location. I've found that I share my photos much more now, and I also really enjoy having a single stream for my DLSR and smartphone photos (my workflow is to backup uncompressed DSLR photos then upload to Google.) Picasa served me well, but I've moved on as well.
- rocky1138 11y ago
  Does Google Photos support Canon CR2 raw format?
  - therealmarv 11y ago
    yep.
- wstrange 11y ago
  A big +1 Having an "AI" organize, edit and tag my photos frees up a lot of time. Part of the transition is learning to let go of the way I used to manage photos. I still want the right to take all my stuff with me - but I think Google has done a reasonable job of ensuring that happens.
  - nattaylor 11y ago
    You're right: export exists but couldn't definitely use some work. I also wish there was a better way to manage captions/descriptions. How do you manage photos now? Do you still keep an offline copy? With any folder structure?
amykhar 11y ago
I had assumed Google Photos was the Picassa code rebranded. Since Picassa was the engine for photos in G+, and then G+ photos moved to Google Photos, it never dawned on me that Picassa was still running as its own separate thing. I wonder why they felt compelled to redo photos?
ikeboy 11y ago
I feel like companies that shut a product down should release source code. Then people who still want to use it can continue development. If the company doesn't offer it anymore, why do they need to keep the code secret?
- prodigal_erik 11y ago
  That's like trying to move a fully locked-in AWS service to your own hardware. Probably all of its dependencies are Google cloud infrastructure and you have to rewrite the client layer to replace them with anything open.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    There's a desktop Picasa client. That could be released as a standalone.
deleted 11y ago
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roobine 11y ago
Can we have a new api for Google photos please. I'm choosing between Google photos and amazon cloud drive and cloud drive have a pretty good api.
Mizza 11y ago
Every time this happens, people act surprised. Every single time. It happens like clockwork, every 3 months. People should realize by now that Google is a company that makes money through surveillance advertising, and _every single other thing they do_ is basically part of a PR campaign. If you don't want this to happen to you, don't use Google. Use something that you have control over.
- frik 11y ago
  The shocking thing is that even companies like Microsoft are no better today. The user and his data are the product with their recent products like Win10, Office365. Adobe and Autodesk are on the same bandwagon with their subscription software, but not as mean and dirty as MSFT. Only Apple is still 1990s-style (traditional) and at least let's you deactivate their cloud stuff with a few simple options. We definitely need more good companies that respect the consumer.
neves 11y ago
You can't view or create "specific content", such as tags, captions or comments in Google Photos. If you find them important for your photo organization, all your work to date will be lost. Hope they will allow 3rd party apps to upload to Google Photos. Hope they will someday publish an uploader for Linux desktops. Even Google Music has one.
aikah 11y ago
At least it allows the competition to exist,provide and focus on a specific service Google isn't capable of providing since "not the core business". I wonder when Gmail will be deemed as "not the core business" too. It will allow paid alternative to be a viable option, just like Rss Readers and now Photo management apps.
sergiotapia 11y ago
My wife and I take a lot of pictures on our smartphones. What service can I pay for that will: - Automatically upload our pictures from our smartphone - Keep them private, viewable only to use, or family members. - Nice gallery feature. - Easy to export all data in one go. I will pay cold hard cash for this. My wife will decapitate me if I lose our backup pictures of our kids when they were babies.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- pchristensen 11y ago
  iCloud Photo Library does this. The Mac Photos client can pull down the full library and the be backed up etc as a normal file.
  - hsshah 11y ago
    Have you figured out a way to have a shared (family) photo library? My wife and I use different iCloud accounts, are part of iCloud Family. However, I cannot setup a single shared library for all the kid's pictures we take.
  - sergiotapia 11y ago
    Nice. I didn't know it was on my iMac. All the pics I took on my iphone are already backed up on photos online. Pretty nifty!
- grahamburger 11y ago
  We use Google Photos for exactly this. We have an account that is separate from our personal accounts that we share. That account is on all of our devices and all photos upload to it directly. We pay for 1TB of storage ($10/month) Easy to share albums w/ fam and friends. Also crazy good search - like ' photos of [son's name] and [wife's name] at the beach in may' will return photos of ... exactly that. With no tagging.
  - 11y ago
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monkbroc 11y ago
Google Photos is still missing a lot of functionality of Picasa. For year I've been uploading pictures to an album named with the current year. My parents and in-laws can check the pictures of the kids when they like. The Photos upload activity on Android doesn't have a selector for the album like the Picasa upload did. There still doesn't seem to be a way to interact with Google Photos through scripts. Search for "google photos api" and the first link is still the Picasa Web Albums Data API...
- CSDude 11y ago
  Yeah, If Google continues to not provide an API, I will write my own Selenium scripts to provide functionality, and we all now how will that end.
gambiting 11y ago
I hate how google just changes things on a whim. It took me a few years to educate my parents how to use picasa to manage their pictures efficiently. They used to access all online albums by going to plus.google.com then clicking on the panel on the left then pictures. Until one day...it was just gone. No indication where to go now. Unless of course you follow tech news and know that you have to go to photos.google.com now. Now they are retiring picasa in favour of Google Photos which are an absolute nightmare to navigate interface wise. What is the difference between albums, collections and shared collections? When uploading photos I can choose any of those and I have no idea what the difference is. I also learned the hard way that deleting something from your album does not delete it from your photos like it did in Picasa.
therealmarv 11y ago
So now we only have Lightroom? I ask myself if I'm the only one who recognized that Picasa is way faster than Lightroom in indexing and face recognition? It feels way faster for viewing and managing. Actually Picasa is very optimized for desktop usage. I don't understand why to throw a good product away... it should go open source or it should be supported by another company for the future.
edwinnathaniel 11y ago
Anyone knows a good desktop app to organize photo like Picasa that works for Windows/Linux/OSX? Specifically there are a few things I like from Picasa: 1. Import files to folder based on picture dates e.g.: c:\pictures\2016-02-12\P0221314.jpg 2. Import videos from mobile devices and display in the right orientation for example: I have mobile devices and I take movies in different orientation: vertical or horizontal, while the actual file's metadata is left unchanged, Picasa knows the _right_ orientation and will adjust the playback accordingly. 3. Handles upload from different devices I have a Lumix GF1 and iPod. Importing pictures to Picasa is super easy without any 3rd-party integration/interruption (e.g.: doesn't have to copy from device to a temporary folder first but instead import directly from the device to the dated folder).
- mtreis86 11y ago
  I like digikam. I don't know how many of your requirements it passes. Opensource suite built on top of imagemagick.
- jonathankoren 11y ago
  I have some scripts on github I use to organize photos on my hdd. It doesn't fix orientation, but it does a decent job of putting things in the right directories. https://github.com/jonathankoren/photo-autorganize https://github.com/jonathankoren/photo-autorganize
- junto 11y ago
  On Windows, the default photo importer allows you to import and name files in a variety of ways. I personally keep the file name from the device, and the importer places it in a dated folder, based on date taken, rather than date imported. It also deals automatically with orientation of videos and photos based off the Exif data.
- scholia 11y ago
  There's a list of photo organizers at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_organizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_organizer ACDSee is very good but not cheap. Windows Photo Gallery is great as a free Windows program, but isn't being updated, so I assume it is going the same way as Picasa... I don't use Picasa or Google Photos, I just funnel stuff via DropBox and OneDrive.
jbarham 11y ago
Man this is annoying. I've used Picasa desktop for probably 10 years now. It's not perfect but for keeping my family photos organized and doing quick edits before printing them or uploading them to our family blog it's great. That Google would suggest the Photos desktop uploader is an adequate substitute is a joke. FWIW I also use Lightroom for more advanced editing but for regular people LR is overkill and complex. I'd be perfectly willing to pay for an easy-to-use photo organizer but megacorps like Google & FB are killing off the market for paid software by using free software & services as a trojan horse to lure users to upload their data to the cloud where it can be mined for all its worth.
barney54 11y ago
I really hate this decision--and I love Google Photos and own Lightroom. Picasso has been one of my favorite products for years. It is simple and just works. But because it's not online, Google now hated it. Once upon a time there was a company who claimed their motto was "don't be evil." I really wish they wouldn't have changed.
- muglug 11y ago
  > Once upon a time there was a company who claimed their motto was "don't be evil." I really wish they wouldn't have changed. Woah, that's some intense hyperbole. Whatever else Google has done, it's not "evil" to stop providing updates to a product that helps people organise their photos.
dingdingdang 11y ago
Ah, the fun (irony here). Before user-end computing can regain a semblance of sensibility we will need to move towards guaranteed secure sandbox environments for apps that allow historical re-use of earlier versions. What is happening at the moment is that IMMENSE quantities of skill development and time is continually flushed away everytime Google/Microsoft/Take-your-pick-software-company decides to retire or dramatically rewrite an app. The situation is even wilder in the closed gardens (Android/IOS) and cloud/web-only where perfectly fine software disappears overnight and then.. that's it. Wake up, we're throwing our mental resources down the drain on a completely unprecedented scale because no systemic solution to this issue exists!!
- o_____________o 11y ago
  And so castles made of sand melt in the sea eventually
- pjc50 11y ago
  That's what Free Software was supposed to protect users from.
  - manaskarekar 11y ago
    Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/
  - akkartik 11y ago
    Not really. Notice that grandparent said "the situation is even wilder in the closed gardens". It still exists in open source. Rolling back a set of packages to some older state isn't a trivial operation, and rewrites are incredibly expensive no matter who's doing them. Open source is a prerequisite, but this isn't a solved technical problem. The challenge is to make codebases rewrite friendly. The bottleneck isn't the rewrite itself, it's all the risk due to the regressions that rewrites tend to cause, and all the stress from trying to catch these regressions before a release. I've been working on ways to express more tests than our current (c 1970) unix stack can support. The goal: to be able to certify a release to production just by running its automated tests. No large projects today meet this standard. Once we do I think we'll be in much better shape to undertake dramatic rewrites, and to reuse code between projects/rewrites. (More info on my project: https://github.com/akkartik/mu https://github.com/akkartik/mu)
ChicagoDave 11y ago
Open source it!!!
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Google Photos is OK so I don't mind Picasa going away (I hadn't used the desktop app in years). While having services cancelled is troublesome, for photos I have my smartphone backup up everything to Google Photos, Microsoft Azure, and Dropbox. Copy the eggs and store in three different baskets.
robbrown451 11y ago
Google photos is really quite cool (sometimes almost magic), with one exception. You can't put a caption on a photo. (to my knowledge) That's ridiculous.
dimgl 11y ago
I have a question. I'm wondering why big companies buy smaller companies but don't keep their branding. For instance, if Google bought Picaza, why not just make Picaza the de-facto image storage app? They'd replace their Photos app with Picaza, and call it a day. Something similar happened recently with Songza. Is there any reason in particular why small companies are bought out by big companies and their brands are dissolved rather than building on top of their initial branding?
- thinkdevcode 11y ago
  Big companies are already big brands. Most acquisitions take place for talent, IP, or users/customers.
danols 11y ago
Never rely on a Google product that isn't used by at least 80% of their user-base. It days are numbered.
pnathan 11y ago
It's kind of ironic seeing all the people on 'hacker news' wanting someone else to provide a service. Why not hack the good hack and make your own system to do what you need from Picasa?
jmspring 11y ago
An interesting comparison, Microsoft generally bends over backwards to keep things compatible and running. Google seems to turn things off with regularity.
agumonkey 11y ago
Open Source Picasa Google, release it instead of letting him die instead of forcing poor users into your identity crysis.
- brodock 11y ago
  If they do no one will migrate to photos. That's why they are killing it instead. Reader was killed because google plus feed was being competed by, and so on.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    Then they're digging their own grave. They rose because they gave no brainer value. Mail that wasn't sluggish with comfortable storage capacity and free. Easy to use map service, so on and so forth. Now they're playing funny games, just like any average company. Laughable.
Altay- 11y ago
So when is Google+ dying. That whole project is such an embarrassment...
jl6 11y ago
Many years ago I became so disillusioned with the state of photo management (churn, inscalability, vendor lock-in, lack of Linux support, etc.) I built my own. Have never looked back - I will never enter metadata into a propriety system again. Auto-tagging AI makes me a bit envious though.
rubenv 11y ago
A good time to dig up an old article of mine: https://rocketeer.be/blog/2015/05/google-photos/ https://rocketeer.be/blog/2015/05/google-photos/ (Google Photos - Can I get out?) My biggest complaint still stands: no true API (which is what made flickr great). Love Google Photos, add a real API and it'll be even better.
pilif 11y ago
I stopped using Google photos the moment it decided that it was time to start duplicating all my photos and then storing the duplicates in my iPhone library where they will be pushed to iCloud and from there to all my other machines. I know that syncing is hard and I can totally see that it's probably unwise to let both apple and Google have a go at the same time, but I would have hoped for this not to happen. Google Photos sharing features, search and their automated trip album builder are much better than apple's, but apples sync keeps the pictures synced natively between all my devices which is a very useful thing to have.
satbyy 11y ago
The biggest reason I don't use Google Photos is the lack of a slideshow functionality. Think about it. It's a photo app and doesn't have fullscreen functionality, which is a requirement basically. I'll continue to use Picasa.
alkonaut 11y ago
Is there an open source project for a Picasa/Lightroom Windows desktop photo organizer? Otherwise let's start one. Reaching very basic organizer behavior with an SQLite backend should be pretty quick. Reaching Picasas level of polish will be harder but you have to start somewhere.
grandinj 11y ago
maybe we can start some kind of petition to have them open-source it?
vit05 11y ago
Mobile, Mobile, Mobile... Ok, we get it. But, please, remember of Google+. Do not try force people to do something, killing what they use now. If the other option is really better, they will migrate really soon.
sytelus 11y ago
Why not open source? The 3rd party dependencies can be put behind interfaces.

209 points by mvgoogler 11y ago

tmaly 11y ago

like Google Reader, this was probably not a core part of their business.

Alex3917 11y ago
Google Reader should have been though. If they have used that as the core of Google+ then it could have had a shot at becoming the next Facebook.
nikolay 11y ago
And what's their core part? Self-driving cars?
- baldfat 11y ago
  I would put it this way. Google Photos blows away Picasa Web Albums and Imgur is a better host. It was dead as Flickr will be in the next year or so sadly.
  - nikolay 11y ago
    I understand that, but they broke the web by killing it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Advertising. If it doesn't relate to advertising or have some ad revenue channel, don't expect it to stick around for long.
  - nikolay 11y ago
    ... but it could be. They still can serve ads there!
- frewsxcv 11y ago
  Beside the point, but isn't the self-driving car project under Alphabet and not Google?
  - nikolay 11y ago
    I was being sarcastic...
daave 11y ago
Unlike Google Reader, this product was replaced with a newer (and, IMO, better) alternative, Google Photos. Albums you had in Picasa aren't gone, they're just accessible through the new UI. Why should Google maintain two competing UIs for the same product? [these opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer, Google]
- danieldk 11y ago
  Albums you had in Picasa aren't gone, they're just accessible through the new UI. Well, except that some photos do not show up in Photos and only in Picasa Albums (e.g. images shared through Hangouts). Also, Picasa had a lot more photo management features.
- nadgob 11y ago
  I used Picasa to organize my photos offline, so Photos is in no way a replacement. Are there any plans to open source the desktop application?

nikolay 11y ago

I'm tired of these shutter-downers! They broke a gazillion URLs! At the same time they penalize you if you do similarly!

enf 11y ago
The old URLs redirect as far as I can tell.
- nikolay 11y ago
  Are you sure? This is great news then!
mvgoogler 11y ago
Where do you get the impression that "a gazillion URLs" broke? Picasa Web Albums will continue working until the album archive view is ready. Also, all of the photo from PWA are hosted in Google Photos Backend - and will continue to be hosted there. There are accessible in Google Photos and the URLs will continue to work. If you haven't seen it, the original blog post has better information than the linked article: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-pica...

NathanKP 11y ago

A lot of people who used Google Blogger hosted images for the blog in Picasa. If the URL's break a lot of old blogs will lose content.

nikolay 11y ago
Yeah, but maybe Blogger is next in line!
- mintplant 11y ago
  The only thing keeping Blogger alive is probably that Google uses it for their own blogs.
  - nikolay 11y ago
    Yeah, I thought the same, but they would move to Google+ Pages.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
mvgoogler 11y ago
The blogger photo are still there and hosted in Google Photos Backend. The urls will continue to work.

pgrote 11y ago

Alternatives for desktop picasa? Desktop Picasa is also going away and it is what I use for organizing my photos. I understand the backend of Picasa Web is replaced by Google Photos, no problem. My problem is with the desktop organization. Desktop Picasa allows for one feature no other alternative I have seen allows ... tagging of multiple photos. Does anyone have a web or desktop alternative that supports tagging on individual and multiple photos? Google seems to have forgotten about this feature in Google Photos. Thanks!

deanCommie 11y ago
I mean it's going away insofar as they are no longer supporting it. However they haven't put out features in years. If it works for you, keep using it. It's what I do. Unless it's sync functionality stops working with Google Photos, I guess, which would be undesireable...
stevesearer 11y ago
I use Picasa on the desktop to organize my photos as well. While they are not going to develop it any more, it should still work if you have it installed right?
- pgrote 11y ago
  You are correct from what I read and understand. My concern is that one day something will stop working with desktop picasa and the Google Photos backend. I'd like to find something to move to so when the inevitable happens I am don't have to worry.
  - mikecb 11y ago
    There's a desktop uploader that you might be able to point at the picasa folder, or just throw pics at it and then organize on the web.
GBond 11y ago
I also would like to know if others have suggestions. I've tired Apple Photo/iPhoto/Aperture and Capture One. I find they have severe performance or usability issues.

al_biglan 11y ago

Huge pet peeve of Google... Develop a great little application/product that pulls you in and develops a decent user base only to have it disappear. I get that in a normal company, the finances might in fact dictate that the company can no longer support the user base with the revenue collected. With Google.. these free services seem to disappear with little warning. (to be fair: 4 years of not updating the official Blog was a big clue...) All that said... just as I was getting used to Wave... poof Just as I was getting used to GOOG-411... poof Google Talk... Don't mind the innovation, but it seems that rather than releasing new versions of existing products to introduce new features and help folks migrate, you get an entire new product to learn/adopt. I can't believe I'm saying this but... I prefer Microsoft's approach to improving their product lines. (sigh)

notatoad 11y ago
Picasa web albums has hardly disappeared. It was replaced by Google Photos (then Google+ photos) a couple years ago. They left the old interface around for years to allow people to transition over at their own pace, you can't really expect a better migration path than that.
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  Google photos doesn't have a desktop app. Being able to sort pics on a desktop is just as important, if not moreso, as being able to sort pics on the web. Not everything needs to be, nor should be, a pure webapp.
  - jbob2000 11y ago
    That's kind of Google's modus operandi though, isn't it? They don't make desktop apps unless there is a distinct need for it (Google Earth, for example). They are all about the web!
    - CaptSpify 11y ago
      I think that's the complaint though: Why take a perfectly fine working desktop application, move it to the web, then remove the desktop side? Presumably, if I wanted the web version, I would have started with the web version.

signal11 11y ago

The Picasa desktop app for Windows had one of the nicest image viewers -- it was my default until I wiped my Windows 7 box. Thanks to the Picasa team for a great service over so many these years!

ungzd 11y ago

Mobile, mobile, mobile. If only phones wouldn't be so crappy, barely usable to do anything other than scrolling some primitive "content" with finger. And you are required to buy a new phone every half a year, thanks to Google too.

kensai 11y ago

I really hate it when Google does this and it's not the first time, as mentioned by others. Of course it's a free service and I should be grateful for even having it so far, but at least (with so much money to burn anyway), they could keep it going indefinitely.

VikingCoder 11y ago
If Google kept useless things that nobody used running indefinitely, they'd run out of money eventually and then they'd be Yahoo!
- anexprogrammer 11y ago
  Picasa is hardly useless, and fills a spot I can't think of a direct equivalent I can use to replace it. Google talk was perfect, light weight and pleasingly free of the cruft and crap that alternatives like skype insist on loading themselves with. Now replaced by hangouts which has an appalling visual design, and has no desktop app (No, I don't always have my browser open, or want to). Google Reader... etc. The list is getting horribly long for killed things that are neither useless, or little used. Oh, and it seems like a little while before they run out of money. I imagine they could keep Picasa and talk supported and hosted until the heat death of the universe, and still have a few pennies in the bank.

kevinsd 11y ago

I think the closing down is normal in this case. If you were google, how would you motivate any SDE or ops to devote any time to it, given that a newer replacement is already in place?

miahi 11y ago

Time to move on. I mainly used Picasa Web Albums because of its seamless integration with the Picasa Desktop Application. I guess the integration will not work with Photos. Photos is mobile-oriented to the point that is almost useless on desktop. My photos were moved, but I have no idea if the permissions were kept. All the albums moved to "collections" have a "shared" label in the list, but then when I go to the specific collection and press "Sharing options" the "anyone with the link" is not selected; does this means they made all my photos public? Also, I have no idea how to give somebody a link to my "Photos" page (all collections). Also seems that having the link to the "shared" collection empowers anyone to download the full photos at the uploaded resolution. This was available in Picasa only as a per-album option (and the user needed to have the Picasa browser extension to do so). Well, this means I don't have to pay Google for storage anymore. Also that I have to find a new place for my photos and a way to integrate it with (a) desktop application.

danieldk 11y ago
The whole Google Photo infrastructure has other weirdnesses. Photos/images that I share with Hangouts don't show up in Google Photos. Previously I could remove them with Google+ Photos, but since that was shut down, I used Picasa web albums to remove Hangouts images. Another interesting thing that I noticed is that some photos are not added to Google Drive if you upload them to Google Photos and have the Google Drive functionality enabled. Turns out it's exactly the photos that I already shared with Hangouts. Their whole photo story is a mess.

ooo000ooo 11y ago

The sooner we start using IPFS or similar, the better. The current web is too ephemeral. Just how much information is going to be lost, like tears in rain; how many blog posts, images, forums; with only the internet archive as a last resort.

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nattaylor 11y ago

I was a Picasa user for several years and I really liked it, but after Google Photos was announced and I saw the handwriting on the wall and completely switched (with much consternation) to Google Photos and have had a great experience. I uploaded over 17,000 to the Google-free tier and applaud all the automation they have built around auto-panorama-stitching, auto-animations, auto-face-tagging, auto-object, and auto-location. I've found that I share my photos much more now, and I also really enjoy having a single stream for my DLSR and smartphone photos (my workflow is to backup uncompressed DSLR photos then upload to Google.) Picasa served me well, but I've moved on as well.

rocky1138 11y ago
Does Google Photos support Canon CR2 raw format?
- therealmarv 11y ago
  yep.
wstrange 11y ago
A big +1 Having an "AI" organize, edit and tag my photos frees up a lot of time. Part of the transition is learning to let go of the way I used to manage photos. I still want the right to take all my stuff with me - but I think Google has done a reasonable job of ensuring that happens.
- nattaylor 11y ago
  You're right: export exists but couldn't definitely use some work. I also wish there was a better way to manage captions/descriptions. How do you manage photos now? Do you still keep an offline copy? With any folder structure?

amykhar 11y ago

I had assumed Google Photos was the Picassa code rebranded. Since Picassa was the engine for photos in G+, and then G+ photos moved to Google Photos, it never dawned on me that Picassa was still running as its own separate thing. I wonder why they felt compelled to redo photos?

ikeboy 11y ago

I feel like companies that shut a product down should release source code. Then people who still want to use it can continue development. If the company doesn't offer it anymore, why do they need to keep the code secret?

prodigal_erik 11y ago
That's like trying to move a fully locked-in AWS service to your own hardware. Probably all of its dependencies are Google cloud infrastructure and you have to rewrite the client layer to replace them with anything open.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  There's a desktop Picasa client. That could be released as a standalone.

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roobine 11y ago

Can we have a new api for Google photos please. I'm choosing between Google photos and amazon cloud drive and cloud drive have a pretty good api.

Mizza 11y ago

Every time this happens, people act surprised. Every single time. It happens like clockwork, every 3 months. People should realize by now that Google is a company that makes money through surveillance advertising, and _every single other thing they do_ is basically part of a PR campaign. If you don't want this to happen to you, don't use Google. Use something that you have control over.

frik 11y ago
The shocking thing is that even companies like Microsoft are no better today. The user and his data are the product with their recent products like Win10, Office365. Adobe and Autodesk are on the same bandwagon with their subscription software, but not as mean and dirty as MSFT. Only Apple is still 1990s-style (traditional) and at least let's you deactivate their cloud stuff with a few simple options. We definitely need more good companies that respect the consumer.

neves 11y ago

You can't view or create "specific content", such as tags, captions or comments in Google Photos. If you find them important for your photo organization, all your work to date will be lost. Hope they will allow 3rd party apps to upload to Google Photos. Hope they will someday publish an uploader for Linux desktops. Even Google Music has one.

aikah 11y ago

At least it allows the competition to exist,provide and focus on a specific service Google isn't capable of providing since "not the core business". I wonder when Gmail will be deemed as "not the core business" too. It will allow paid alternative to be a viable option, just like Rss Readers and now Photo management apps.

sergiotapia 11y ago

My wife and I take a lot of pictures on our smartphones. What service can I pay for that will: - Automatically upload our pictures from our smartphone - Keep them private, viewable only to use, or family members. - Nice gallery feature. - Easy to export all data in one go. I will pay cold hard cash for this. My wife will decapitate me if I lose our backup pictures of our kids when they were babies.

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pchristensen 11y ago
iCloud Photo Library does this. The Mac Photos client can pull down the full library and the be backed up etc as a normal file.
- hsshah 11y ago
  Have you figured out a way to have a shared (family) photo library? My wife and I use different iCloud accounts, are part of iCloud Family. However, I cannot setup a single shared library for all the kid's pictures we take.
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  Nice. I didn't know it was on my iMac. All the pics I took on my iphone are already backed up on photos online. Pretty nifty!
grahamburger 11y ago
We use Google Photos for exactly this. We have an account that is separate from our personal accounts that we share. That account is on all of our devices and all photos upload to it directly. We pay for 1TB of storage ($10/month) Easy to share albums w/ fam and friends. Also crazy good search - like ' photos of [son's name] and [wife's name] at the beach in may' will return photos of ... exactly that. With no tagging.
- 11y ago

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monkbroc 11y ago

Google Photos is still missing a lot of functionality of Picasa. For year I've been uploading pictures to an album named with the current year. My parents and in-laws can check the pictures of the kids when they like. The Photos upload activity on Android doesn't have a selector for the album like the Picasa upload did. There still doesn't seem to be a way to interact with Google Photos through scripts. Search for "google photos api" and the first link is still the Picasa Web Albums Data API...

CSDude 11y ago
Yeah, If Google continues to not provide an API, I will write my own Selenium scripts to provide functionality, and we all now how will that end.

gambiting 11y ago

I hate how google just changes things on a whim. It took me a few years to educate my parents how to use picasa to manage their pictures efficiently. They used to access all online albums by going to plus.google.com then clicking on the panel on the left then pictures. Until one day...it was just gone. No indication where to go now. Unless of course you follow tech news and know that you have to go to photos.google.com now. Now they are retiring picasa in favour of Google Photos which are an absolute nightmare to navigate interface wise. What is the difference between albums, collections and shared collections? When uploading photos I can choose any of those and I have no idea what the difference is. I also learned the hard way that deleting something from your album does not delete it from your photos like it did in Picasa.

therealmarv 11y ago

So now we only have Lightroom? I ask myself if I'm the only one who recognized that Picasa is way faster than Lightroom in indexing and face recognition? It feels way faster for viewing and managing. Actually Picasa is very optimized for desktop usage. I don't understand why to throw a good product away... it should go open source or it should be supported by another company for the future.

edwinnathaniel 11y ago

Anyone knows a good desktop app to organize photo like Picasa that works for Windows/Linux/OSX? Specifically there are a few things I like from Picasa: 1. Import files to folder based on picture dates e.g.: c:\pictures\2016-02-12\P0221314.jpg 2. Import videos from mobile devices and display in the right orientation for example: I have mobile devices and I take movies in different orientation: vertical or horizontal, while the actual file's metadata is left unchanged, Picasa knows the _right_ orientation and will adjust the playback accordingly. 3. Handles upload from different devices I have a Lumix GF1 and iPod. Importing pictures to Picasa is super easy without any 3rd-party integration/interruption (e.g.: doesn't have to copy from device to a temporary folder first but instead import directly from the device to the dated folder).

mtreis86 11y ago
I like digikam. I don't know how many of your requirements it passes. Opensource suite built on top of imagemagick.
jonathankoren 11y ago
I have some scripts on github I use to organize photos on my hdd. It doesn't fix orientation, but it does a decent job of putting things in the right directories. https://github.com/jonathankoren/photo-autorganize https://github.com/jonathankoren/photo-autorganize
junto 11y ago
On Windows, the default photo importer allows you to import and name files in a variety of ways. I personally keep the file name from the device, and the importer places it in a dated folder, based on date taken, rather than date imported. It also deals automatically with orientation of videos and photos based off the Exif data.
scholia 11y ago
There's a list of photo organizers at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_organizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_organizer ACDSee is very good but not cheap. Windows Photo Gallery is great as a free Windows program, but isn't being updated, so I assume it is going the same way as Picasa... I don't use Picasa or Google Photos, I just funnel stuff via DropBox and OneDrive.

jbarham 11y ago

Man this is annoying. I've used Picasa desktop for probably 10 years now. It's not perfect but for keeping my family photos organized and doing quick edits before printing them or uploading them to our family blog it's great. That Google would suggest the Photos desktop uploader is an adequate substitute is a joke. FWIW I also use Lightroom for more advanced editing but for regular people LR is overkill and complex. I'd be perfectly willing to pay for an easy-to-use photo organizer but megacorps like Google & FB are killing off the market for paid software by using free software & services as a trojan horse to lure users to upload their data to the cloud where it can be mined for all its worth.

barney54 11y ago

I really hate this decision--and I love Google Photos and own Lightroom. Picasso has been one of my favorite products for years. It is simple and just works. But because it's not online, Google now hated it. Once upon a time there was a company who claimed their motto was "don't be evil." I really wish they wouldn't have changed.

muglug 11y ago
> Once upon a time there was a company who claimed their motto was "don't be evil." I really wish they wouldn't have changed. Woah, that's some intense hyperbole. Whatever else Google has done, it's not "evil" to stop providing updates to a product that helps people organise their photos.

dingdingdang 11y ago

Ah, the fun (irony here). Before user-end computing can regain a semblance of sensibility we will need to move towards guaranteed secure sandbox environments for apps that allow historical re-use of earlier versions. What is happening at the moment is that IMMENSE quantities of skill development and time is continually flushed away everytime Google/Microsoft/Take-your-pick-software-company decides to retire or dramatically rewrite an app. The situation is even wilder in the closed gardens (Android/IOS) and cloud/web-only where perfectly fine software disappears overnight and then.. that's it. Wake up, we're throwing our mental resources down the drain on a completely unprecedented scale because no systemic solution to this issue exists!!

o_____________o 11y ago
And so castles made of sand melt in the sea eventually
pjc50 11y ago
That's what Free Software was supposed to protect users from.
- manaskarekar 11y ago
  Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/
- akkartik 11y ago
  Not really. Notice that grandparent said "the situation is even wilder in the closed gardens". It still exists in open source. Rolling back a set of packages to some older state isn't a trivial operation, and rewrites are incredibly expensive no matter who's doing them. Open source is a prerequisite, but this isn't a solved technical problem. The challenge is to make codebases rewrite friendly. The bottleneck isn't the rewrite itself, it's all the risk due to the regressions that rewrites tend to cause, and all the stress from trying to catch these regressions before a release. I've been working on ways to express more tests than our current (c 1970) unix stack can support. The goal: to be able to certify a release to production just by running its automated tests. No large projects today meet this standard. Once we do I think we'll be in much better shape to undertake dramatic rewrites, and to reuse code between projects/rewrites. (More info on my project: https://github.com/akkartik/mu https://github.com/akkartik/mu)

ChicagoDave 11y ago

Open source it!!!

mark_l_watson 11y ago

Google Photos is OK so I don't mind Picasa going away (I hadn't used the desktop app in years). While having services cancelled is troublesome, for photos I have my smartphone backup up everything to Google Photos, Microsoft Azure, and Dropbox. Copy the eggs and store in three different baskets.

robbrown451 11y ago

Google photos is really quite cool (sometimes almost magic), with one exception. You can't put a caption on a photo. (to my knowledge) That's ridiculous.

dimgl 11y ago

I have a question. I'm wondering why big companies buy smaller companies but don't keep their branding. For instance, if Google bought Picaza, why not just make Picaza the de-facto image storage app? They'd replace their Photos app with Picaza, and call it a day. Something similar happened recently with Songza. Is there any reason in particular why small companies are bought out by big companies and their brands are dissolved rather than building on top of their initial branding?

thinkdevcode 11y ago
Big companies are already big brands. Most acquisitions take place for talent, IP, or users/customers.

danols 11y ago

Never rely on a Google product that isn't used by at least 80% of their user-base. It days are numbered.

pnathan 11y ago

It's kind of ironic seeing all the people on 'hacker news' wanting someone else to provide a service. Why not hack the good hack and make your own system to do what you need from Picasa?

jmspring 11y ago

An interesting comparison, Microsoft generally bends over backwards to keep things compatible and running. Google seems to turn things off with regularity.

agumonkey 11y ago

Open Source Picasa Google, release it instead of letting him die instead of forcing poor users into your identity crysis.

brodock 11y ago
If they do no one will migrate to photos. That's why they are killing it instead. Reader was killed because google plus feed was being competed by, and so on.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Then they're digging their own grave. They rose because they gave no brainer value. Mail that wasn't sluggish with comfortable storage capacity and free. Easy to use map service, so on and so forth. Now they're playing funny games, just like any average company. Laughable.

Altay- 11y ago

So when is Google+ dying. That whole project is such an embarrassment...

jl6 11y ago

Many years ago I became so disillusioned with the state of photo management (churn, inscalability, vendor lock-in, lack of Linux support, etc.) I built my own. Have never looked back - I will never enter metadata into a propriety system again. Auto-tagging AI makes me a bit envious though.

rubenv 11y ago

A good time to dig up an old article of mine: https://rocketeer.be/blog/2015/05/google-photos/ https://rocketeer.be/blog/2015/05/google-photos/ (Google Photos - Can I get out?) My biggest complaint still stands: no true API (which is what made flickr great). Love Google Photos, add a real API and it'll be even better.

pilif 11y ago

I stopped using Google photos the moment it decided that it was time to start duplicating all my photos and then storing the duplicates in my iPhone library where they will be pushed to iCloud and from there to all my other machines. I know that syncing is hard and I can totally see that it's probably unwise to let both apple and Google have a go at the same time, but I would have hoped for this not to happen. Google Photos sharing features, search and their automated trip album builder are much better than apple's, but apples sync keeps the pictures synced natively between all my devices which is a very useful thing to have.

satbyy 11y ago

The biggest reason I don't use Google Photos is the lack of a slideshow functionality. Think about it. It's a photo app and doesn't have fullscreen functionality, which is a requirement basically. I'll continue to use Picasa.

alkonaut 11y ago

Is there an open source project for a Picasa/Lightroom Windows desktop photo organizer? Otherwise let's start one. Reaching very basic organizer behavior with an SQLite backend should be pretty quick. Reaching Picasas level of polish will be harder but you have to start somewhere.

grandinj 11y ago

maybe we can start some kind of petition to have them open-source it?

vit05 11y ago

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile... Ok, we get it. But, please, remember of Google+. Do not try force people to do something, killing what they use now. If the other option is really better, they will migrate really soon.

sytelus 11y ago

Why not open source? The 3rd party dependencies can be put behind interfaces.