Google is closing its long-running photo organiser Picasa. Mike Plant explains what you need to do now to preserve your photos
What’s happening?
Google is closing Picasa. Support for the desktop program ended on 15 March – so it will receive no more updates – while Picasa Web Albums will be “retired” from 1 May, meaning that though your photos will remain online you won’t be able to create or edit albums.
Why is Google doing this?
So it can focus all of its resources on Google Photos (https://photos.google.com), its online photo-storage service which launched last year. That’s all well and good, but the main reason people still use Picasa is that it provides useful desktop tools for organising your images, something Google Photos can’t offer.
What does this mean for you?
If you have Picasa on your PC and use it to organise your photos, there’s no need to panic. Picasa will remain fully functional on your computer and any photos you’ve saved to online web albums will stay exactly where they are. However, a lack of security updates will expose any program to hackers in time, so Picasa users should start planning for the future.
Should you move to Google Photos?
If you use Picasa to organise your photos you should seriously consider Google Photos. Google wants you to do this, of course. In fact, you’ll probably find that it has already copied your online Picasa images to Google Photos (though they’ll also remain in your Picasa Web Albums). You can move any images it missed from your PC using Google Photos Backup (www.snipca.com/20045).
Google Photos works well as a means to view your photos, and it lets you back up an unlimited number online for free as long as you don’t mind Google compressing them.
The best Picasa alternatives
If you want to continue managing your photos from your PC, there are a couple of great, free Picasa alternatives you can try.
DigiKam
DigiKam combines photo organisation and editing in one handy package. The free download from www.snipca.com/20042 comes with a full suite of programs, including image viewer ShowFoto, RAW image converter DNGConverter, and the DigiKam image editor.
The package lets you add effects to your images, reduce noise, process film negatives, correct lens distortion and more (see www.snipca.com/20043 for tutorials). You can also import images directly from your online Picasa account. Click Import in the toolbar (press Control+M if the toolbar is hidden), copy the identifier code that appears in your web browser, paste the code into the box and click OK. To preserve how the folders appear in each album you need to import them one by one. Choose the album you want to import – Profile Photos in the screenshot below – set a destination folder and click Start Download. Repeat this process for your other Picasa albums.
FastStone Image Viewer
FastStone (www.snipca.com/20041) can open any image file type you can think of, including RAW, which makes it as flexible as Picasa. It also lets you zoom into images in full-screen mode free of any distracting toolbars – simply open the image in FastStone, doubleclick it then press ‘A’ on your keyboard. Press escape to return to the normal view.