After over a decade of ownership of the product, Google announced just a few weeks ago that they will be closing the shutters for good on Picasa, a cross-platform photo viewer and organizer with basic editing capabilities. In the, Google has set March 15 as the end of support for the desktop client, with changes to the accompanying web album hosting service set to roll out later in the spring. While it wasn’t open source, as free product with a strong commercial backer, Picasa’s desktop client had become quite popular among amateur photographers, and so with news of the project’s discontinuation, many are wondering where to turn next for their photo management needs.
Here are 5 free Picasa alternative software to organize and edit your photos. Most of these software also let you bulk convert, rotate, and resize photos. Photo Studio Standard The Best Alternative to Picasa. It's no mystery why people adopted Picasa, Google's simple photo management software. However, with the announcement that Google is ending their desktop photo management software, users are going to be searching for an alternative to Picasa.
Picasa was available across multiple platforms, and while it had not been recently packaged for Linux, it still worked well for many Linux users inside of. Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve had to recommend alternatives to a discontinued Google product; three years ago, we helped you find for your RSS reading needs. While there’s no word yet on whether Google will release the code for Picasa under an open source license now that it has been discontinued, fortunately for you, there are many open source alternatives already out there to help you with your photo organizing and editing needs. Photo viewers For some, the greatest value in Picasa was just as a simple photo viewer and browser; a great to quickly flip through multiple images without waiting for a full fledged editor to load, but going a little above and beyond their operating system's default. Here are some great replacements for that need.
Some, like Picasa, offer minor touch-up abilities, while others are strictly viewers. •, the built-in image viewer with many Linux distributions, does a fine job with displaying images in most common formats, although it is slated to see an upgrade in the near future as GNOME moves towards for file previews. • is another open source basic image viewer, which, while simple, benefits from the speed that comes with being so lightweight, and is a good choice for Windows users.
• is a Qt-based image viewer for Windows or Linux which is designed to be fast and flexible with thumbnail caching, mouse and keyboard shortcuts, and support of many formats. Photo organizers The major functionality of Picasa that puts it above just a photo viewer is photo organizing. Once you’ve got a few hundred photos in your collection, a flat structure just won’t cut it; after a few thousand, it’s simply impossible. Additionally, photos often contain a great deal of metadata which can help in the organization process if you can easily edit it. Here are a few open source tools for organizing your photos. • is an image organizer that is a part of the KDE family, supports hundreds of different file formats, has multiple different collection organization methods, and supports user plug-ins to extend its functionality. Of the open source image organizers listed here, it's probably the easiest to get working for Windows in addition to its native Linux packaging.