Ex- Picasa users...

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pdxgene
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Joined: May 28th, 2008, 10:03 pm

Ex- Picasa users...

Post by pdxgene » August 7th, 2016, 7:05 am

Was anyone else out there still using Picasa until the last couple days? Google photos doesn't look nearly as user-friendly at first glance. Are you sticking around or moving on to Flickr or some other program? It seems a shame to move on after all these years but they certainly didn't seem to give much a $#@! about us.

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Peabody
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Joined: August 12th, 2011, 8:37 pm

Re: Ex- Picasa users...

Post by Peabody » August 7th, 2016, 7:33 am

Thanks for the heads up. For photos downloaded from my Cameras I use Picassa as a desktop app only & back my PC up using Carbonite. Since Picassa allows you to bypass the cloud I can see why Google would kill it. I don't agree, just understand.

I do use Google Photos, but only for backing up photos on my smartphone. For this purpose I think it's a good solution.

For photos posted to this site I use Photobucket or upload them directly to Oregonhikers.org.

I just realize how many different photo products I use for different reasons.

Oregonhikers.org > Photobucket
Picassa > Cameras
Google Photos > Smartphones

So with Picassa support dropped looks like I'll need to find another desktop app. :( or figure out something that works for all three use cases.

Suggestions?
"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E.B. White

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RobFromRedland
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Re: Ex- Picasa users...

Post by RobFromRedland » August 7th, 2016, 1:06 pm

After upgrading to windows 10 and Picasa started doing strange things, I found out Google was dropping support for it. Since I didn't plan on going backwards, I looked at quite a few other windows apps. What I ended up with was Cyberlink PhotoDirector. I don't like it as well as Picasa, but it was the best compromise I found. One thing I liked in particular with Picasa was that it was relatively simple. It allowed you to do some editing, etc, but it was pretty simple. Most of the apps I reviewed were more geared at professional photo editing with all the bells and whistles. For me, Picasa was a great program for casual users. I've not found anything similar in my searches. If anyone finds a good Picasa clone or substitute, I would love to know.

Great thread topic.
Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: WOW! What a ride! - Hunter S. Thompson

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Koda
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Re: Ex- Picasa users...

Post by Koda » August 8th, 2016, 8:36 am

Ex Picasa user here and haven’t looked back. I stopped using Picasa about 3 years ago when I felt it became too integrated with Google+ social media and Gmail, they didn’t give me a choice and so I felt it best to not have all my digital eggs in one basket, so to speak. I just noticed my bookmark to my old Picasa album is no longer working, have no idea now how to get to them now…. Once again, Picasa screws me over.

I moved to Smugmug and love it there. It’s a paid photo service but feel the features are worth it and have unlimited storage. Most of all I have complete control over who can see, view or even find my photos on the web…. Nothing automatically goes public or is saved anywhere like Google+.
Smugmug is integrated with Pickmonkey.com for basic free photo editing.

I cant recall what I found at the time, I know there are other free photo album websites but since Google started that way I decided it was worth paying for a service dedicated to photo albums only. My thought that was any free site is more prone to change or sell out in a different direction (Picasa>Google+>"Google Photos"... notice how its labeled "their" photos, ahem…) at any time and so I didn’t want to invest more years of photos. The impression I get from the About page is Smugmug will not sell out and was created by photographers for the users photography, that was the same impression I got 4 years ago.


edit to add a link to an old thread discussing Smugmug and other options: http://www.oregonhikers.org/forum/viewt ... it=smugmug
lightweight, cheap, strong... pick 2

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Guy
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Re: Ex- Picasa users...

Post by Guy » August 8th, 2016, 10:29 am

Also a Smugmug user, signed up with them back in 2004.

Out of curiosity I just checked my account, seems I have north of 42,500 photos in my account :)

http://guy.smugmug.com
hiking log & photos.
Ad monte summa aut mors

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kepPNW
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Joined: June 21st, 2012, 9:55 am
Location: Salmon Creek

Re: Ex- Picasa users...

Post by kepPNW » August 8th, 2016, 12:52 pm

I never liked Picassa. Just a weird Googly interface, I guess. <shrug>

I share photos on Flickr, and can't find a thing to complain about! (Can't compete with Guy, though -- I "only" have 17,684 photos there!) Free terabyte of storage, and stupid-simple BBCode embedding. You can see how I've arranged each hike into an album, using the link in my sig.

Only caution I'd throw out there right now would be for this ongoing Yahoo sale/turmoil. Flickr could become a casualty of sorts, I fear.
Karl
Back on the trail, again...

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retired jerry
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Re: Ex- Picasa users...

Post by retired jerry » August 8th, 2016, 3:15 pm

I hope my yahoo mail doesn't go away

Or they don't "realize the commercial value" of yahoo mail and make it unusable

greenjello85
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Re: Ex- Picasa users...

Post by greenjello85 » August 8th, 2016, 4:10 pm

I use amazons auto-backup for all my photos (included with prime) and Flickr for posting hiking photos on here. The only difficult part is they made me sign up for a yahoo email and I can't ever remember my yahoo email :) I used photobucket in the past but I found it glitchy, and it had an incredible amount of ads that drove me nuts.

Lurch
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Re: Ex- Picasa users...

Post by Lurch » August 9th, 2016, 7:22 am

Not to be the Google fanboy or anything, but for what it does Google Photos is pretty elegant and a wee bit creepy..

It's facial recognition is ridiculous. We're probably all feeding our robot overlords with data, and you don't *need* to associate actual contacts to it but you can. Unlimited free hosting for 12mp images isn't too shabby either. I've put up old family photo albums and used it's search functionality to ID people. You don't need to tag things as much as you used to, as it's creepily context aware and will identify content itself (for example, I can search my photos for 'turkey' and it will bring up all the photos with my turkey in them, even though I've never tagged them).

There are some drawbacks though, I wish I could have more than 2k images in an album (that may be weird I know), I wish it was better at bulk modifications and more options for sorting.. I think it's still young though as a platform

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Bosterson
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Re: Ex- Picasa users...

Post by Bosterson » August 9th, 2016, 9:03 am

Koda wrote:Ex Picasa user here and haven’t looked back. I stopped using Picasa about 3 years ago when I felt it became too integrated with Google+ social media and Gmail, they didn’t give me a choice and so I felt it best to not have all my digital eggs in one basket, so to speak. I just noticed my bookmark to my old Picasa album is no longer working, have no idea now how to get to them now…. Once again, Picasa screws me over.
Try going here:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos
(That will only work if the browser you're in is signed into your Google account.)

When I go to that link, there's a Picasa "album archive." But all of those albums were already imported into Google Photos, so they were never lost. The only issue I see is that the Google Photos interface is very Facebook/smartphone based and obnoxious to use. It's also weird to get links to the photos for embedding in a TR: the "URL" that it makes isn't a ".... .jpg" type deal, it's a whole, super long scramble of code. Linking photos still works with it though...

FWIW, all of my photos in Picasa web albums (I never used the actual program) were automatically set to private, and were not findable by anyone via the web unless I gave out a link to the album, or linked directly to an image, like embedding it in a TR. I also never had to deal with G+ (which they've phased out?), and certainly the Picasa web album interface was "old;" it's just that Photos is not exactly an equivalent replacement.
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