
Moving on from Picasa - mvgoogler
http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html
======
al_biglan
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)

~~~
anoonmoose
Your comment about the blog prompted me to go check the Google Voice
blog...nothing since May 2013. Crap. I've been using, loving, and recommending
GV since I started using it in 2010 when I got my first smartphone...one day
they're just gonna up and shut down GV and not only will I lose a service I'm
extremely fond of but I also won't get, you know, phone calls, because that's
the number I've handed out for the last five years.

~~~
tshtf
I ported my number out of Google Voice a couple of years ago. Some things to
keep in mind with GV:

* Your only form of "support", even when paying to port out a number, is a forum staffed entirely with volunteers. If you're actually using GV it's useful to read through here to see the trainwreck: [https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/voice](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/voice)

* As the parent mentioned, the GV Blog is barren.

* You're better off porting out your number now given this support situation.

~~~
neves
Which consumer Google product has a kind of support different than a volunteer
forum?

Try to get help for Google Music, or Google+, or an Android software.

They should at least sponsor and monitor some tags in the stack exchange
forums like Microsoft does.

~~~
kuschku
The best support (the only real support) I’ve ever gotten for Google products
were

(a) partnersupport-de@youtube.com (support for youtube partners, monetized,
back in the days, German),

(b) This very website. Start an angry thread, get it to the front page – or
post a comment on a frontpage thread about a dev topic – and suddenly some
Google dev ends up fixing it, and in the same moment, your comment on here
disappears.

Support methods I have also tried:

(c) Buying Google Apps for Business (the 30 day free month), then calling
their support, after the support call was successful, cancelling it again
(doesn’t work, Google doesn’t answer Google Apps for Business calls, someone
takes your call, you say hi, in the same second they hang up on you)

Support methods I have not tried yet, but plan to, in case the previous ones
don’t work anymore:

(d) Just arriving in person at their nearest Google office, getting entrance
somehow, and then directly providing my complaints to the next manager (at
risk of getting sued for entering their office illegally)

~~~
enobrev
I received some excellent support from the GCS (Google Cloud Storage) team
while I was working on my last project. There was only an email address listed
in the API docs. I didn't have high hopes when I first contacted them with an
issue, but I got a response in less than 24 hours, and a similarly quick
response to my following response. That first problem was due to my own
misunderstanding of the API, which the person in question patiently helped me
better understand.

The last time I was in contact with them was a few months ago. I got another
reasonably-timed response, and this was an issue on their end (something to do
with an occasionally missed automated notification when files were uploaded).
It took a couple weeks or so to fix the problem, but they contacted me after
each upgrade (rather than waiting for me to contact them) to follow-up and see
if my issue had been resolved. After a couple rounds, it was fixed.

I'm not sure I've ever received personal support from Google prior to that,
but in my experience, the GCS support team was/is absolutely top notch.

------
dingdingdang
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!!

~~~
pjc50
That's what Free Software was supposed to protect users from.

~~~
archagon
It's unfortunately hard to make money on your software if it's free. (Assuming
your primary interest is making software, not providing support.)

Personally, I'm going to try open-sourcing my retail software a) once sales
goals have been met, and b) without the art assets. Maybe that would be a good
compromise.

~~~
takeawayandrun
I haven't really seen this done but couldn't Google pour money in to
developing very high quality GPL'd libraries for say.. C++ or Python -
becoming the defacto standard libraries. If other's want to use them in their
closed source projects they'd have to pay licenses to Google, however
internally they can use them in their closed source code since they own the
rights to it.

The trick would be get that critical mass where competing libraries aren't
used as much. Google definitely seems to have the talent and workforce to do
it

~~~
anon1385
Why would they do that? Google isn't a charity.

Anything that makes it easier to develop native software (which
'won't-suddenly-disappear' software has to be) is in direct conflict with
Google's strategic interests (Chrome, ChromeOS) and their bottom line.

~~~
takeawayandrun
What? Businesses that try to to use the libraries they create would have to
pay royalties... how is that charity?

------
pgrote
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!

~~~
_yp
Try DigiKam - it's open source and its photo management features work very
well.

> Does anyone have a web or desktop alternative that supports tagging on
> individual and multiple photos?

DigiKam!

~~~
dade_
Fantastic feature set, but on Windows importing from USB cameras doesn't seem
to work and it also isn't stable, so a deal breaker. As Picasa hasn't had any
love in years, it's future demise was obvious, and my hope is that this
creates a whole lot more attention for DigiKam on Windows as it seems to work
well on Linux.

------
nattaylor
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.

~~~
wstrange
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
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?

------
jbarham
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.

------
Mizza
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
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.

------
signal11
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!

------
dimgl
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
Big companies are already big brands. Most acquisitions take place for talent,
IP, or users/customers.

------
gambiting
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.

------
edwinnathaniel
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).

~~~
jonathankoren
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)

------
therealmarv
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.

------
pnathan
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?

------
NathanKP
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
Yeah, but maybe Blogger is next in line!

~~~
mintplant
The only thing keeping Blogger alive is probably that Google uses it for their
own blogs.

~~~
nikolay
Yeah, I thought the same, but they would move to Google+ Pages.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

------
monkbroc
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
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.

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

~~~
brodock
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
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.

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

~~~
enf
The old URLs redirect as far as I can tell.

~~~
nikolay
Are you sure? This is great news then!

------
miahi
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
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.

------
neves
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.

------
amykhar
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?

------
pilif
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
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.

------
robbrown451
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.

------
rubenv
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.

------
jmspring
An interesting comparison, Microsoft generally bends over backwards to keep
things compatible and running.

Google seems to turn things off with regularity.

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

~~~
nikolay
And what's their core part? Self-driving cars?

~~~
baldfat
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
I understand that, but they broke the web by killing it.

------
aikah
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
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.

~~~
anuragbiyani
Why doesn't Google Photos work for you ? It does provide all the features you
mention (depending on definition of "Nice gallery feature" of course), and on
top of it really awesome search features.

Full disclosure: I work at Google (not on the Photos product though). All
opinions expressed are purely mine, and not of my employer.

~~~
kjhughes
I agree with sergiotapia about Google Photos falling short in the area of
sharing pictures among family members. If we do trust Google not to kill off
Google Photos...

Without grahamburger's hack of creating an independent, shared account (which
I wonder whether is strictly allowed by account usage terms), how can a family
share all of their photos? I'm not talking about sharing an album. My wife and
I would like all photos taken from either of our phones be automatically
uploaded and shared between us. We've not found a way to do that using Google
Photos without making everything public, which is unacceptable.

~~~
free2rhyme214
Private links, like Google Drive has, is probably an upcoming feature.

------
alkonaut
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.

------
jl6
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.

------
vit05
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.

------
roobine
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.

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

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

------
kensai
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
If Google kept useless things that nobody used running indefinitely, they'd
run out of money eventually and then they'd be Yahoo!

~~~
anexprogrammer
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.

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

------
ungzd
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.

------
kevinsd
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?

------
ChicagoDave
Open source it!!!

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

------
ooo000ooo
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.

------
ikeboy
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
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
There's a desktop Picasa client. That could be released as a standalone.

------
barney54
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
> 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.

