My old laptop finally crapped out, so bye-bye Picasa, which wasn’t all that great anyway. Now I need a decent but simple desktop program for photos. Simple tools are all I need: crop, contrast, etc. Nothing complex like PhotoShop, just something I can upload my photos to and post them on FB or wherever. New laptop is not Apple.
Have you tried the native Photos app in Microsoft 10?
Google Photos is the replacement for Picasa. I’m still using Picasa 3.9 for organizing and Paint Shop Pro for editing.
No, I just picked up this laptop today and haven’t had much chance to explore. I suppose I should just give in and have the photos live online somewhere.
I’ll second this. In fact, you should find that your Picasa photos have been automatically transferred to Google Photos for you.
I must be the only person on this board who uses PhotoScape. But I really like it. It’s simple, but relatively powerful.
…Google Photos is the online replacement for online Picasa: but it doesn’t replace the Picasa client (which lives on your computer and has also been discontinued.)
Check out the Faststone range of products: their image viewer isn’t bad…but I wouldn’t call it a Picasa replacement. You could try Infanview which is an image editor, but not really an image manager. Phototheca 2 does the sort of image management stuff Picasa does, but not the editing.
Unfortunately there really isn’t anything on the market that does what Picasa did so well. I still have it on my computer despite looking around for a replacement when Google decided to discontinue it.
Professionally I use Lightroom and Photoshop, paying the photographer creative cloud subscription at $10.00 per month. But that might be over kill for you. But Lightroom is awesome: and well worth the money on its own.
Give it a try - it’s a simple photo editing tool just like you say you want - cropping, contrast adjustment, straightening, etc. If you want to back your images up to the cloud, you can upload them to OneDrive, Google Photos, Amazon … wherever you want.
Yes, this.
And this. I really like Picasa and still use it all the time - and I can still use it to directly upload albums to Google Photos.
I also have the whole suite of Adobe stuff, plus a couple different versions of Elements, and most of the time it’s just overkill unless I need to do some heavy-duty editing.
You can’t get Picasa from Google anymore, but you can get it from filehippo. I recently downloaded it after a clean install on my Windows 7 laptop and it works fine. You’d have to check to see if it’s compatible with W10.
irfanview.com very easy to use
Since I’m going to have to recreate all of the albums, I guess I’ll just go with Google or Windows. What a PITA.
I have been dutifully ignoring all the requests on my Mac to dump Picasa for whatever replacement they’re flogging.
Picasa works fine for my purposes, enhancing and cropping images for printing out photos or posting them online.
You shouldn’t have to recreate your albums from Picasa if you move to Google Photos. I didn’t. My albums were all preserved.
That’s been my experience as well. As I alluded to earlier, the app is still available for download and retains the functionality (like emailing and uploading to Google Photos), but they’re never going to update it. I’ve been using Picasa for many years for basic image manipulation and organization and I don’t think there’s another free app that has quite the same set of tools. If I want to “mess with” an image beyond Picasa’s capability I just right-click, open with Photoshop Elements, and go on from there.
They’re preserved as albums, but the album titles are gone, replaced by dates. Who searches by date?
I don’t know what to say, then. My album titles were all preserved, too.
It is all about the young now IMO.
“Any picture I take I want one button to post, blurs and all, every picture, even at monster size to a place that will post to FB, Tw, Ig, Email list for all 3876 of my friends who have monster connection and will never look at them but NEED to have them there… right now… And I am too lazy to cull them & resize them and put up just the XX% that are worth anything… That would make them going up too late for my friends to get the full impact of just how great I am.”
It may be because I had saved all of the albums to an external drive. When I cleaned up the old laptop, I deleted all files and most of the programs off of it. Perhaps Google sees these as generic files. Dunno, but it’s not a deal breaker.