What to do since Google abandoned Picasa

[Huck Rorick]

Sooner or later Picasa3 is going to stop working on newer machines and obviously no improvements are going to be made.

Does anyone have thoughts on alternatives?  This is not a short term problem, but over the long haul it is going to be significant.

Also, I wonder if someone could take over Picasa, develop it and market it?

But anyway, what are alternatives to Picasa for the future?

[eyeks]

Me too!

I have countless hours sunk in Picasa tagging people in my pictures...

I've started on Google Photos, but it's no where near what I have in Picasa - no way to preserve tags I know of. There's Adobe Lightroom...

Thanks for any input anyone may have...

[earlboss]

Hi:

Here is a thread on the Picasa forum about replacements for Picasa, but the general conclusion is that Picasa is unique:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/picasa/Cqm_Gly8Zwk;context-place=forum/picasa 

As for someone else taking over development, We have been pummeling Google with requests to release Picasa to Open Source, or sell it to another company or group, but so far there has been no softening of their position.

On the positive side, they haven't so far killed the links that Picasa uses to Upload to Google photos, so there is still a way to upload from Picasa, but of course Google Photos could evolve to the point that the links would not work. Then we would be stuck with manual uploading. 

Picasa should work till Windows 10 evolves too much which should be at least till 2025.

When People post on either the Picasa or Google Photos forum that Picasa is dead and they hate Google Photos this is usually what I say:

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Why replace Picasa at all in the short term?  

It is still a good photo organizer and editor, and since it runs on your PC and manages photos on your PC, Google can't make the present version stop working.

I am a Picasa TC and I and many other users will be continuing to use Picasa 3 until there is an equal or better program.

Google may be dropping support for Picasa, but that isn't going to cause anything to happen to your photos or the ability to use Picasa 3 with them.

Picasa is installed on and lives on your PC and works with your photos on that PC hard disk.  There is nothing Google can do about that.  They haven't been giving Picasa more than token support for years now and it still is the best free solution to managing the photos on your PC.

Unfortunately, Google Photo Backup  does not provide any way of keeping your folder structure. They just put the photos, no matter what folder they came from in one big pile sorted by Date Taken. There seems to be no support for a tree structure like we are all used to on the computer. We should all lobby hard for folder support in Google Photos.

The bottom line here is you would probably be best served by staying with Picasa 3 Desktop, at least until something better (or even equal to) comes along

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As of March 29, Google has taken down the download site where you download the installer, but you can get the setup program from trusted commercial download sites. Of the commercial download sites, FileHippo has always been reliable.

Picasa can be downloaded from FileHippo at: http://filehippo.com/download_picasa/  

Be sure to use the green button in the upper righthand corner labeled "Download Latest Version", not some other big green addware button. 

This FAQ shows you how to download and install the latest version: Update-picasa-to-latest-version

It would be a good idea to have a couple of copies of the Picasa installation file Picasa39-setup.exe squirreled away so you can install it if you need to re-install Windows or get a new PC

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Here is the Picasa FAQ site: https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/Home/Picasa-FAQ  

We maintain this site to help users with problems, and have lots of info on using Picasa.

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Earl