Picasa will be phased out in favor of Google Photos

Is anyone happy with google photos from a photography standpoint? This is terrible to me as I used Picasa and had tags - which were not converted, and now cannot even be used in picasaweb (what is left of it). Google has really annoyed me with this photos fluff piece that I can't even force farce tags on in any easy way and has ruined 100's of hours of organization.

I do like the phone integration and auto backup, but still the searching is terrible unless google does it automagically for you. Very sad and looking for an alternative.

I’m an enthusiast DSLR user taking thousand photos per year. My workflow:
1) I take a lot of shots…
2) I move pics on my local hard drive(s)
3) I rename files with my favorite naming convention: event tag, progressive number…
4) With Picasa, I tag my photos, star them to facilitate future search
5) I create Picasa Album choosing only better/favorite pictures from the many I shot. No physical duplicate will be created by Picasa on my hard drive. No space will be wasted until I’ll decide to export Album.
6) I improve my picture by cropping/rotate them, enhance luminosity… Physical files are not touched by Picasa and I can experiment as I want. This is fantastic for me.
7) If I want, I upload on PicasaWeb just the albums, not entire folders, with only selected photos.
So… do you have some Picasa alternative suggestions covering, above all, steps 5 and 6 of my workflow? I am looking for these features on the web, but nothing seems to fulfill such requirements… Is really Picasa so unique?

Any suggestion for a standalone replacement software on a PC? Picasa was very useful to me but I will not transfer my stuff to the cloud, NO way!

I keep Picasa because I find it the simplest way to email images using gmail. It allows me to specify the file size without having to physically resize every image first in my photo editor, and thus sending multiple images is a breeze.

I am pleased to read that I will continue to be able to use this very useful aspect of Picasa.

This is terrible to me as google photo's gives you limited control and management as far as I can tell. Picasa has worked very well. Perhaps another vendor will work better. Tough after 8 years.... So now I will have to tag images and faces, and organize them and put them in/out of albums and share them using a web application???? WTF!!!

If you go to the Picasa forums, there is a petition they are asking us to sign to try and get them to keep it the way it is. If you can't find it let me know. I don't know if it will do anything, but it certainly can't hurt. I have stored and edited my pictures on this web site since it started. I have 4 hard drives of pictures all organized with this awesome website. It was just so easy to use. They have said to download Picasa to a safe place, just in case. They have also said it will work with Windows 10. Let's hope thats true. I was looking to get a new computer soon.
Nothing comes close to this program.

Why did Google buy Nik again? It sure doesn't seem to be the business they're interested in.

FastStone Image Viewer has the best digital photo editing tools this side of PhotoShop.

It is a loss for long time Picasa users, no doubt.
Hopefully, someone will adopt the idea and develop it even further.
Faststone could be a logical choice even if they need to charge for providing the comparable service.

I love what Google provides for us generally but sometimes I think decisions are made so internally that what is good for the company (inside) can be very wrong for users outside. Not different from any large organization or for that matter government. Google's emphasis on mobile for photography (understandable to chase scale) and forcing images to be saved on Google servers to use the Photos software (possibly for Google use in organizing information-not a bad thing) can easily be seen as having major advantages for the company.  However by doing this (and abandoning Picasa) they weaken and alienate the desktop using (perhaps more serious photographic community) group of users. The action taken by Google will no doubt lead to greater internal efficiency and productivity but is a severe blow to a large group of users. If the company can go from Google to Alphabet  surely continued support for Picasa and Photos is within their capability.

I think this is really Google shooting itself in the leg. Their motto was "don't be evil". Try to avoid people hating them as they hate other big corporations. Now users like us, not many when compared to smartphone users perhaps, but still quite a few - are very displeased.
The Google photos app is so bad it is not worthy of further comment. Except perhaps to say it aimed squarely at 5 year olds.
As for myself, with nearly 100000 images, managed by Picasa over more than 10 years, I have not found anything similar yet. I am considering incorporating the name tags into the EXIFs of the files so as at least to save some of the work done.
I can only join others in hoping Google will let others pick up the work where they left off.

Insane, I have been using Picasa for years after a really bad experience with Iphoto
Is there a simple, trusted (that will last) program for MAC that I can use to organize photos? (I just downloaded the ACDSee trial for mac..and tried to download photos from the iphone and it crushed miserably while doing so!!! Again, unbelievable. I just had my sister from Europe visiting and she keep asking me to send her a folder with all the pics and I just can't:
IMAC i7 with 24gb RAM, Iphone 6s 64 GB. and STILL CAN"T store my photos in a decent way! F**K apple and google!

I should give up uploading photo and video and keep organising them neatly. Countless hours were spent in doing that. From pbase shifted to flickr and from flickr shifted to Picasa, google+, ...

Each of these photo sharing sites has its cons and limitation. That is the main reason for spending countless hours on organising them.

Internet cloud storage shares some common characteristics with could on the sky. It keeps changing. You can't organize them perfectly in your way. It may even disappear totally in somedays.

Without nested folders, tags, and perfect search engine, cloud is always messy. This is the nature.

Even PC OS have changed, tagging on multiply files are not as conveniently as before. Messy and imperfect cloud system are what we can have for years to come until the day of super smart AI search engine.

Anyone knows a similar tool that would allow to create a web Album with captions under each photo and publish it (with restricted use)? I have not tried Google Photos but it appears it cannot do captions...What a shame!

I've used PICASA for years and have tried Google Photos. PICASA is still Google's best online photo album system; however, I guess they're more interested in turning their systems into social media services with little concern about the PICASA users they're leaving behind!?

Google Photos is not of real value to me. It lacks so much of the friendliness of PICASA that I suspect I'll move elsewhere for a service that works the way I do. It is, however, a shame they've merrily gone and deleted all the album comments that I've accumulated over the years. We had accumulated an image knowledge base (KB) in these comments and now they're gone. This KB were very valuable to our clientele!

Not looking forward to porting thousands of images to a new service...

Picasa is one of the most public friendly straight forward photo apps for storage and application Google Photo is a different one Shame that I would abolish too soon..... too user friendly...I have 6000 photos on Picasa ...sure missed Picasa a lot...

Picasa may have seemed to kinda align with Google's overall product line and core services 10 years ago but it just doesn't anymore. And, it was free, so there's little motivation for them to continue maintaining it.
I am curious if they have considered selling it. There has to be some value with it's popularity, which is not only because it's free. Other companies that currently have image editing / raw processing software with no indexing organization functionality could benefit, or some of the camera manufactures?
Having used it for many years now, I started trying to migrate myself to lightroom last year. But, I still find it's often quicker for me to find something in picasa at times, and am disappointed at seeing it phased out.

Judging by the majority of the comments, this may be good news for Irfanview, GIMP and all those other 3rd party photo managers that let you keep your photos on your computer.

I use Linux and have 20TB of photos on my disk array. How does Google Photo help with that?

I also want to note that I've been a foster dad, and have many photos of our foster kids -- which by law cannot be online. As foster parents, we're required to prepare a "lifebook" as personal history for each kid, but there are potentially serious, and fairly obvious, issues with the wrong people getting access to such photos. Similar constraints now generally apply for photos taken of your own kids in school plays, etc. -- because there may be other kids in the same activities who are foster kids, etc.

In sum, running Picasa locally has been great for picking-out the photos of our foster kids to make lifebooks, but I have not seen any way that Google Photo legally can be used for any such thing. I would encourage Google to think about doing what many companies have done with abandoned software: make the last version an open source release so that others could continue to support it.

Would be great if Google could publish documentation for the desktop file format (picasa.ini) so that other applications can take over.

This seems a sort-of logical step, as Picasa was a fully fledged app from many years ago. Now Google will be able to do what they do with all their other apps, which means remove most of the useful features, add silly new features that you don't need, and generally spoil the interface a little bit more on every update.

Gotta try the Google Photos.

Better sooner than later, before Google closes it too.

"We believe we can create a much better experience"

Frankly, nothing coming out of Google in the past decade ever improved anything.

They are as disconnected from their users as Microsoft was in the 90s. They are simply incapable of creating good user experience.

The Picasa application is a great photo management tool. It searches thru all exif data in any of your monitored paths. So it doesn't matter what application created the image. I don't know of any other applications that work like this.

Google Photos is another story. It is missing a ton of features that are available in Picasa Web. Stuff like sorting albums by newest/oldest first, slide shows and more.

Removing from the market what people love is really bad business. Why not charge some $ for it instead? I don't share my pictures with friends or relatives (they couldn't care less) but Picasa has been the simplest way to find and name my shots. Adobe Bridge has some qualities in this way too.
I will never install Lightroom, and since Canon, I don't have to tweak my shots much either.

What a pity! Been using Picasa for 11 years now. Never was there a (free) program that was so user friendly. The straightening tool, and resize tool were unmatched by even high-end fee paying software for ease of use. I even think its auto WB was pretty accurate - for a one-button correction! As for photo management - you could do it with your eyes closed! It just worked.

Sad to see it go.

Disappointing, i enjoyed the desktop version of Picassa as it allowed me to view folders of photos AND videos, it seemed happy to play videos in a variety of resolutions and photos of different sizes all from the same folder in full screen view. with out poping up a separate video player Great for making a folder of favorite photos/videos from a holiday etc. and making a slide show, or just browsing.

I use Lightroom, but my first choice is always Picasa. The user interface is quicker for organising my photos. The "split folder here" feature is perfect for splitting up bunches of photos taken on the same day. I don't know of a product that is as good as Picasa, at any price.

All I care about is having a decent desktop application.

I don't care too much if it is Picasa web or Google photos. I care a lot more about the Picasa desktop. For a while one can keep it I presume. Nobody will delete it from your PC. But the question is a new PC how will it get installed on a new PC?
I have almost a terra byte of photos, mostly RAW on a separate hard drive which is backed up. If the computer goes the data does not die with it. . One can browse them easily with Picasa. I have no interest of uploading all that.
All I hope somebody will jump in maybe a third party and maintain it or come up with something similar.

shame - love Picasa - and i want my pictures on my computer.

I've been using Picasa Desktop for many years, and also started using Google Photos when it was released. It seemed like the start of a great service, but is clearly missing many critical features.

That said, the one feature that has kept me loyal to picasa desktop for so many years is the ability to add/edit location data (geotags) to my images. To date, I have yet to find any software that will offers this feature is a simple/easy-to-use way. Whether they plan to in the future or not (doubtful) Google Photos clearly doesn't offer the feature either.

Does anyone know of a decent deskop application that allows geotagging? Would appreciate any suggestions.

According to Google's Terms of Service: "When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services"...

"...Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection"

No wonder they're not updating Picasa desktop software since. I just hit me that they are in the business of big data, luring people to save all photos and videos in their servers so that they can analyze and make a huge business from this user data.

I was alarmed to read this news here. It would have been nice to get an email from Google about this change, but the only notice I received was on my Picasa album page. In the last 10 years, I have made 445 Picasa albums, which I have shared with family, friends, and others. I spent thousands of hours assembling these albums, rearranging photos, and - most important - adding caption information to the images. The albums do not consist of pictures alone; the edited content includes photo order and the captions. To find out what Google Photo is offering, I searched for a recent album. My original Picasa album contained 12 photos of a wedding, all in a particular order. The pictures in the Google Photo version appeared in a random order - WITHOUT THE CAPTIONS! I was finally able to make the original captions appear, but only on a page that also included the camera I used and other information. I am outraged that my work building these albums isn't considered important by Google.

The one thing Google does really well - search, they've decided you no longer need to be able to do with images on your computer, but instead you should upload them all to the cloud first.
Did Google actually consider that some people might not want or be able to upload their entire image collection to the cloud, and that they might like a good desktop search and organising tool to help them locate the images they do want to put in the cloud?

So sad that they are doing this because it is an excellent bit of software. :-( Apps are one thing, and there are hundreds, probably thousands that can do editing on tablets and phones, but I'd rather edit images on a computer.

For total beginners, Picasa does almost everything they want/need. And it is non destructive too, which makes it ideal for beginners. I can show someone how to use it all in about two hours, and there is not many software programs you can do that with, never mind imaging programs.

They seem to emphasize that they are replacing the storage side of it, while ignoring the editing part of what is being lost.

Google has a tendency to ditch things, so I wouldn't rely on them solely for something.

Wonder if Picasa will still work? or will they kill the web albums as well :(

Nooooooo! I love picasa. :(