GOOGLE has announced they will — on May 1 —shut down Picasa, the photo management solution developed by a great team that I was privileged to be a part of in the early 00’s.
Picasa consists of two parts, the desktop photo management software which runs on both PCs and Macs, and an integrated web-based service developed after Picasa was sold to Google in 2002. Technically, they’re shutting down “Picasa Web Albums” — the web service — on May 1, and ending support and enhancements to the Picasa desktop software earlier, on March 15.
The good news is that Picasa’s desktop software will keep working for a long, long time, even without Google’s support (think of your old copy of Word you’ve been using for years but haven’t bothered to upgrade) though its integration with Web Albums will not. That concerns a lot of people, but I’m not one of them.
Picasa as it currently exists integrates nicely with Google Photos (post-publication revision: it appears that Picasa for Mac integrates well, but the PC version still points to Google+. Hope you’re on a Mac), which frankly provides a whole lot better experience than the dated Web Albums service. It’s aesthetically a whole lot prettier, functionally has a lot more goodness, including editing and sharing, and integrates some of Google’s whiz-bang new features like object recognition, trip detection, and location search.
This move frankly wasn’t a big surprise to me. It makes sense to consolidate Google’s photo experience under one brand. It’s actually something I suggested they do a decade ago (I recommended that they move their photo efforts, which included not only Picasa & Web Albums but, at that time Picnik, under one brand. I suggested “Google Photos.”)
It also makes sense (to Google) to move absolutely every part of the photo experience to the web. This marginalizes the value of things like operating systems: since you can view and edit your photos from anyplace you have a browser, you don’t need to be running Windows or Mac OSX. Google wants to be your operating system (Chromebooks, anyone?) It continues the long, inexorable march to the web from desktop software, following in the footsteps of email, word processing, spreadsheets, home finance, etc.
So the loss of the Picasa Web Albums isn’t going to upset me too much. The end of the Picasa desktop software does (though I will point out that with a couple of exceptions, it hasn’t received a whole lot of attention from Google anyway over the last decade, so not a huge change, really.) Picasa has lasted, with essentially the same UI, for 15 years. That’s about 543 in software-years. I think it’s one of the most remarkable pieces of consumer software ever developed.
The biggest breakthrough now seems absurdly obvious. It was the flattening of the folder hierarchy, and using date as the primary organizing signal and UI metaphor (Apple’s iPhoto introduced the same concept at just about the same time as Picasa’s release.) Picasa’s lightning-fast directory scanner also found all your pictures, regardless of where they were located. “I found pictures I forgot I had”, “I knew they were there somewhere” were comments we heard a lot (to be fair, we also heard “your software put porn on my computer” a lot!)
Picasa’s UI presaged many features that would take years to appear in mainstream desktop software, like UI animations, notifiers, and 3D UX elements (yes, I know we’ve moved on to “material” design, but this was 2001.) The performance of the software was (is) nothing short of amazing. We were applying filters in less than a second that took Apple more than 10 seconds. Search speed was amazing. We could handle 50,000 pictures with ease (on a 386!) at time when iPhoto had a published limit of 1,000.
The remarkable, amazing technical and design team at Picasa built these things, and that will be a subject of another post. It’s too great a story to be lost. We had a team of a dozen people or so, and we took on Adobe, Apple and Microsoft. And as far as performance and features are concerned, I think we won.
What will I miss if I stop using Picasa desktop software? The ability to look at my photos, pick the good ones, and put them in an online album and not upload the 90% of my pictures that are junk. The ability to say that I don’t want some of my pictures in my Google Photo library at all, even though that doesn’t mean I want to delete them. I don’t want to be one errant click away from making pictures public that I want to be private. When you have kids, this is important: the Internet can be a nasty place.
The new Google Photos uploader — the anointed replacement for Picasa — seems pretty limited. It watches the folders you tell it to watch, and uploads everything it finds. This mimics what most mobile apps do with their “auto backup” features. Everything goes online, all the time. This seems to be what everyone thinks we want, and the auto-backup is nice, but do you really want your 50,000 pictures everywhere? I don’t.
My workflow isn’t complicated. I unload pictures onto my computer. I look at them. I pick the ones that I like, I “star” them (I advocated for only one star, a scale of 1 to five is meaningless to all but the most anal scrapbooker), and I upload the ones that I like to Google Photos, so I don’t have to dig the weak signal out of the cacophony of noise. I’ve got close to 100,000 pictures, but how many do I really want in my pocket? 5,000?
OK, ok, so making sure all your photos are backed up and you won’t lose them when you drop your phone in the toilet is a good thing. I do that, too. I use Dropbox, and put my “Pictures” directory on a Dropbox drive, as well as enabling their Camera Uploads feature. That way, if I unload pictures from a memory card, or take them with my phone, they’ll be safe and sound. They appear in Picasa automatically because it watches my Dropbox folders (and I tell my OS that my “Pictures” directory is over there, on Dropbox.) Dropbox is my failsafe backup. But I hope I never have to use the Dropbox photos UX to look at them, though (not a huge fan.) They’re just there if I need them, in a good old-fashioned filesystem. I could use Google Drive of course, but I’m scared they will cleverly integrate it with Google Photos, and try to “help” me. I like my backup separate from my curated pictures.
By the way, I don’t obsess over getting this exactly right. I’m probably a little generous with my stars, and err on the side of keeping a picture easily accessible from anywhere, but I bet I cull out 90% of pictures from an event or trip in about 10 minutes per batch. That means I’ve spent between 150–300 hours over 20 years, or roughly half-an hour a week. I think it’s worth it to be able to find the pictures that are important to me.
Google’s theory is that sure, all your pictures go online, but you aren’t overwhelmed by quantity, because their search is so good. After all, if Google could tame the web, can’t they tame your picture library? I’m pretty certain that they’ll get us there ultimately, but we’re not there yet.
Google’s object recognition is (with some embarrassing exceptions, like Gorillas and playgrounds), pretty great at finding things, like cats, or beaches, or food, but I don’t want pictures of beaches, cats or food, I want the good pictures from my last trip to Hawaii. Seeing all the beaches I’ve ever been to makes a nice demo for image science Ph.D.’s but it’s not what I want. And the “collections” that are automatically created are, in my not-very-humble opinion, piss-poor. Really, how much work does it take to figure out I live in Southern California (you can even ask me), and not create a collection called “Trip to Santa Monica and Cleveland”?
There is just so much metadata that is inexplicably ignored, in the service of look-how-smart-we-are-at-sniffing-pixels demoware. How about if I edit a picture (modified date != created date in its most simple implementation), isn’t that a pretty good indicator that the picture is important to me and should take precedence over that blurry picture of my foot? The user generously and effortlessly provides tons of other signals through the way they interact with their pictures. Type “email” or “print” into Picasa’s search bar sometime, and see an undocumented look at an idea that was forming a decade ago but which still hasn’t made it into today’s photo management tools. “That seems like cheating”, a Caltech Ph.D. told me one day not too long ago.
Hell guys, feel free to cheat. Just save me from picture hell, instead of being really good at replicating hell everywhere. In the meantime, I’ll keep using Picasa, thank you very much.
