Picasa and alternatives?

I'm just an amateur with no requirement for robust, professional image
management system.

I've been happy with Picasa for many years both for cataloguing and
simple edits (crop, rotate, compress, a bit of colour or brightness
tweaking).

I've just had to reinstall it following a complete reinstall of Win10,
and of course Google is pestering me about Google Photos. I'm generally
a bit suspicious of all the big five. But is Photos actually a
reasonable replacement for Picasa?

I did dabble with Irfanview some years ago, but found it a bit more
complicated than I needed.

I have a Mac with Affinity for playing with Fuji-X raw files, but I
still do most of my stuff on Windows.

I don't think I would avail myself of the cloud backup option, I prefer
to be a bit more in control. I don't worry about Microsoft and Google
having my calendar and contacts lists, I consider it useful that these
synchronise across devices and they can always be recreated if
everything fails. But I don't see the need for the same thing for photos
and video.

TIA

Per newshound:
I did dabble with Irfanview some years ago, but found it a bit more
complicated than I needed.

ThumbsPlus has a bazillion options - almost none of which I use... but
it allows categorizing photos in multiple simultaneous categories and I
find that very useful.

And the UI is such that all the features do not get in my way.
--
Pete Cresswell

On Tuesday, August 8, 2017 at 8:17:26 AM UTC-4, newshound wrote:
I'm just an amateur with no requirement for robust, professional image
management system.

I've been happy with Picasa for many years both for cataloguing and
simple edits (crop, rotate, compress, a bit of colour or brightness
tweaking).

I've just had to reinstall it following a complete reinstall of Win10,
and of course Google is pestering me about Google Photos. I'm generally
a bit suspicious of all the big five. But is Photos actually a
reasonable replacement for Picasa?

I did dabble with Irfanview some years ago, but found it a bit more
complicated than I needed.

I have a Mac with Affinity for playing with Fuji-X raw files, but I
still do most of my stuff on Windows.

I don't think I would avail myself of the cloud backup option, I prefer
to be a bit more in control. I don't worry about Microsoft and Google
having my calendar and contacts lists, I consider it useful that these
synchronise across devices and they can always be recreated if
everything fails. But I don't see the need for the same thing for photos
and video.

TIA

Hi,

When Google discontinued Picasa, I put the program onto a CD-R for future use. I still use it, as it gives me all that I need, and it automatically copies all the images from my Windows 7 "pictures" section. That means that if I louse up an image in Picasa, the original image is still intact on my hard drive.

Mort Linder

On 8/8/2017 3:21 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per newshound:
I did dabble with Irfanview some years ago, but found it a bit more
complicated than I needed.

ThumbsPlus has a bazillion options - almost none of which I use... but
it allows categorizing photos in multiple simultaneous categories and I
find that very useful.

And the UI is such that all the features do not get in my way.

Thanks, I will have a look

On 8/8/2017 3:45 PM, wrote:
On Tuesday, August 8, 2017 at 8:17:26 AM UTC-4, newshound wrote:
I'm just an amateur with no requirement for robust, professional image
management system.

I've been happy with Picasa for many years both for cataloguing and
simple edits (crop, rotate, compress, a bit of colour or brightness
tweaking).

I've just had to reinstall it following a complete reinstall of Win10,
and of course Google is pestering me about Google Photos. I'm generally
a bit suspicious of all the big five. But is Photos actually a
reasonable replacement for Picasa?

I did dabble with Irfanview some years ago, but found it a bit more
complicated than I needed.

I have a Mac with Affinity for playing with Fuji-X raw files, but I
still do most of my stuff on Windows.

I don't think I would avail myself of the cloud backup option, I prefer
to be a bit more in control. I don't worry about Microsoft and Google
having my calendar and contacts lists, I consider it useful that these
synchronise across devices and they can always be recreated if
everything fails. But I don't see the need for the same thing for photos
and video.

TIA

Hi,

When Google discontinued Picasa, I put the program onto a CD-R for future use. I still use it, as it gives me all that I need, and it automatically copies all the images from my Windows 7 "pictures" section. That means that if I louse up an image in Picasa, the original image is still intact on my hard drive.

Mort Linder


In fact it is still downloadable. I accept the lack of support. I guess
like Paint it is good PR to keep it available. Was just using Paint
earlier today to crop, annotate and slightly clean up some old files.
Not a lot of functionality, but *very* easy to use.