Desktop Picasa is going away

[Mercutio]

I like the desktop Picasa application for managing personal photos. I like that it recognizes faces. I like that it's easy to add tags and I like that it integrates with Google's online photo galleries since I was actually using Picasa even before Google bought it. But, like a lot of things, Google is planning to kill it in a few weeks. Google Photos doesn't have a desktop client and I have no idea if the current Picasa application will continue to have online integration functions.

On Windows, I actually use Xnview for dealing with non-personal images (cat pictures and porn), but does Picasa seemed uniquely suited for helping to keep the pictures I took organized. I know some of you guys take a lot more pictures than I do, so what are you guys using instead?

 

[ddrueding]

I take a lot more pictures than I look at. Folders sort by year, and then by shoot, with the original RAW images in a subfolder of that. In the year folder is another called "good" that may get one or two pictures from a shoot and at the end of the year has ~75 pictures in it. I browse using Adobe Bridge and edit in Photoshop.

This is not a recommendation; my methods and tools are far from ideal. Just haven't felt the need to investigate further.

 

[Clocker]

I am going to really miss Picasa as well. The facial recognition feature was really great for finding pictures of a certain person.

My 75 year old Dad uses it too and I dread finding a replacement for him.

 

[sedrosken]

Personally I have never been led wrong by IrfanView on Windows and gPicView or Ristretto on Linux. I manually sort by date. The big thing about IrfanView for me in the beginning was that it actually displays animated GIFs properly. Now I suppose I use it more out of habit and the fact that it uses far less RAM than Photos on W10.

Don't take this to mean that I think my way is the 'right' way... I'm just stating what I personally use.

 

[Handruin]

Personally I have never been led wrong by IrfanView on Windows and gPicView or Ristretto on Linux. I manually sort by date. The big thing about IrfanView for me in the beginning was that it actually displays animated GIFs properly. Now I suppose I use it more out of habit and the fact that it uses far less RAM than Photos on W10.

Don't take this to mean that I think my way is the 'right' way... I'm just stating what I personally use.

As someone who has been using IrfanView for a very long time it's not even remotely close to offering the functionality of Google's Picasa. IrfanView serves a much different purpose as a quick-view utility of images, not an organizer of collections.

My photo organizing structure is very similar to ddrueding's with a folder-based system. I don't have a piece of software that manages my images for my in any kind of gallery. Since a good portion of my photos are both RAW and jpeg, I'll often still use Canon's utility Digital Photo Professional to browse through my folders. I'm not recommending it as an alternative, just describing my workflow.

 

[Stereodude]

No love for ACDsee?

j/k

 

[Will Rickards]

I was sad when I heard this news. I mean integrate it with google photos or something (doesn't it already do that?).
But the app will still work. It will be just like if you never signed in to google with it.

 

[sedrosken]

As someone who has been using IrfanView for a very long time it's not even remotely close to offering the functionality of Google's Picasa. IrfanView serves a much different purpose as a quick-view utility of images, not an organizer of collections.

You're right, of course. I do my organizing manually, as I don't need to do it very often. I wonder if there's going to be some kind of successor to Picasa.

 

[LunarMist]

I like the desktop Picasa application for managing personal photos. I like that it recognizes faces. I like that it's easy to add tags and I like that it integrates with Google's online photo galleries since I was actually using Picasa even before Google bought it. But, like a lot of things, Google is planning to kill it in a few weeks. Google Photos doesn't have a desktop client and I have no idea if the current Picasa application will continue to have online integration functions.

On Windows, I actually use Xnview for dealing with non-personal images (cat pictures and porn), but does Picasa seemed uniquely suited for helping to keep the pictures I took organized. I know some of you guys take a lot more pictures than I do, so what are you guys using instead?

Are you just manually entering IPTC/XMP info, keywords, etc.? I'd say Lightroom, Photo Mechanic, even BreezeBrowser can tag the images.