Hi all,

I always used Picasa on Win7 to organise photos in a combination initially of Windows folders and then some albums on top to put photos in collections for printing, photobooks etc. More recently I’ve become more diligent about deleting crap / duplicates so most of the stuff that gets saved is just the decent stuff.

Now Win7 is done I’ve moved to Win10 and wonder what else I might consider now Picasa’s not an option

– I think I’ll be happy to use tags as a way of organising as I used it as a way of preserving my Picasa albums and its more flexible as the tags go with the photo. Is this sensible?
– I don’t want to use cloud services to organise or process, just to backup or gain access from other devices
– Happy to pay but I’d rather avoid subs licensing for stuff like Lightroom as 1) it gets pricey and 2) I don’t think I have a need for a lot of features
– I’m yet to play with Win10 native tooling to see how good that is. In terms of photo processing I’m only really looking at basics like crop and straighten but have been getting into what I can do with Snapseed on iOS
– Photos are coming from a mix of three iphones and a Panasonic camera (not raw but it does shoot raw)

I was using Windows Photo Gallery on Windows 7, but it is now discontinued. The new ‘Photos’ thing in Windows 10 seems a lot more limited. ie no way to tag photos.

So I am using Digikam instead. It can do a lot of stuff for tagging, organising and searching photos. And also some basic editing, though I’ve not tried that much.
And it is all free.

? I have just upgraded to Win 10 from 7 and Picasa works exactly the same as before (as far as I can see)

You don’t like either of the things I’d suggest which would be Lightroom and <span style=”font-size: 0.8rem;”>google photos. Lightroom + photoshop is ~£10/month. Lightroom management and adjustment is very good. Google photos is helpful. But won’t store RAW files in the cloud unless you have a tiny library or buy extra storage.

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Is Darktable (open source Lightroom-like program) available for Windows? https://opensource.com/alternatives/adobe-lightroom

Have you considered a Mac? MacOS Photos is included and offers some OK sub-Lightroom organisational features.

Welshfarmer – how did you get Picasa for Win10?

Picasa was (is) excellent software and I was really pissed off when Google removed it. I lost all my tagging too, which was very annoying.

https://filehippo.com/download_picasa/

Picasa 3 works on Win10. I had the installer file saved, but I you can find it easily enough on the net

Picasa was such a great bit of software. Such a shame they killed it to focus on Google photos.

https://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

The UI is a bit lacking but excellent for organising photos and basic image work.

No idea why it works. It just does 🙂 It is Picaso 3 as above and was working fine on Win7. When I upgraded to Win10 I just did an update-type installation of the OS and chose to leave everything as it was on Win7. So my desktop looked the same and all my old programs were still working, including Picaso.

Apologies for the slight hijack. I have started the massive task of sorting out my photos from the last decade and wondered how you all go about naming your files? do you rename them “family holiday 2019” etc or keep the original file numbering and rely on tags to be able to find all your riding / holiday pics? thanks

I have tried probably 20 applications and none have done what I needed, which is:

1. tagging
2. scrolling all my photos in one massive list with no lag, regardless of what folder they’re in
3. integrated video player (or at least show a preview and allow me to launch the video with another application)

The closest I have got is https://www.digikam.org/

Lightroom also works but I’m not paying a subscription unless it’s £2 a month or something, a tenner is too much.

I moved from W7 to W10 a couple of weeks ago and Picasa is working fine, looks exactly same as before

B.A.Nana

I moved from W7 to W10 a couple of weeks ago and Picasa is working fine, looks exactly same as before

Even ‘working properly’ though it’s not working anything like it used to. E.g. all the maps functionality is broken. There are also some compatibility niggles creeping in- video playback/previewing is completely broken on my PC and crashes the application, scrolling is no longer smooth, and it doesn’t honour high-DPI displays properly so the screen is either blurry or tiny.

I kept a copy of the installer so will try it on Win10 (fresh install, not in place upgrade) but anecdotally it seems very hit and miss and with no active development for around five years. I’d expect it to stop working completely sooner or later hence keen to look for alternatives. Thanks for your posts so far, will try digikam.

Oh and it needs to be IT-illiterate wife-proof from the point of view of browsing through photos and via a simple mechanism (key stroke or big top-level button) add a photo to a logical group for the purposes of export and processing / product-making. Picasa was great in this respect as you could add photos to the tray / album in a single click, at the conclusion of which I’d do the processing and uploading.

scuttler

Member

Oh and it needs to be IT-illiterate wife-proof from the point of view of browsing through photos and via a simple mechanism (key stroke or big top-level button) add a photo to a logical group for the purposes of export and processing / product-making. Picasa was great in this respect as you could add photos to the tray / album in a single click, at the conclusion of which I’d do the processing and uploading.

Exactly and to be honest that’s where all the alternatives fall down. Picasa was great because it was powerful but wrapped in a UI that anyone could use easily.

Maybe at some point I will pull my thumb out of my arse and write an open source replacement for it.

OK I suspect I wasn’t using it to anything like it’s potential