Picasa sucked. Make no mistake about it. Whether on Linux or Windows, Picassa took the worst of all the different photo management software and combined it into a single app that I would never recommend anyone install.
Except one thing; Picasa was good at enhancing photos. It had a couple of automatic buttons that would take iffy photos and spruce them up pretty automatically, and it had a killer red-eye reduction function. But these are things that can be done on other software. If you know how to use The Gimp, you can get the same results there. If you use a Mac, you can get better results with Aperture than Picasa ever produced.
The latest news about Picassa is that Google has decided to stop producing a Linux version of it. Not that they ever did. Picassa was always a Windows app but had a Wine implementation that kinda worked. Now, it won’t even have that.
What if Linux decided to not support Google? Google would shut down in two seconds. A little mutual respect would be appreciated. Fortunately, the app that is now being pulled wasn’t very good to begin with, but still… I’m annoyed.
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I found a package for it in Synaptic, do you mean that they will no longer update it? I get confused sometimes. Isn’t it an open-source app?
Why do they hate Linux? They don’t. But very few people use Linux (on the PC anyways, on servers or smartphone things are different)
The costs of supporting a Linux version just outweigh the benefits I imagine. Simple as that.
Dropping a separate Picasa version for WINE is a good idea, assuming they redirect their resources to supporting WINE. It should be able to run standard Picasa or any other standard Windows app.
I think that Google needs to give back to the Linux community they have reaped so many benefits from Linux.
Dan,you are using Linux right now. It is one of the most widely used OS’s considering that the entire internet mostly runs on it. And, it is an OpenSource system that exists because if its community of users and developers, which includes the desktop community. Which has been seriously dissed by Google. (To the extent that anyone would use Picasa anyway)
Lassi: Wine, unfortunately, mostly sucks. THe only reason Picasa worked on Linux at all is becuase there was an a tempt by the developers to make it work.
Semi-A, you can still get it. Unlike Apple or some other info technology or tech models, they don’t make things disappear from your pocket. The version you can get now will still exist, it just won’t be changed, updated, debugged or improved on by Google. The Wine version will still work.
Picasa would work for ChromeOS? if they drop support for linux, then ??
Google does not hate Linux, it was just a pure business decision, why keep investing in a crappy product that no one uses? It wasn’t even a native app, it was a windows app optimized to run well under Wine (being shipped with wine bundled so that non-technical user might think it was native).
There is no reason for any app to not have a Linux version (given the way software is developed). Only haters don’t make the Linux version.
What do you mean “hate”? Google was giving away for free an app that worked on Linux, now they don’t anymore because nobody used it.
Google does not hate Linux, not if YOU “know” about the many contributions of Google to Linux Kernel and general Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) development.
However Google would have made a smart move early upon the acquisition of Picasa by having their software engineers re-write to application – e.g. in Python – to run on all platforms- thus further eliminating the push towards Windows, which does not aid Google in any way.
The commenter Dan Moutal is emblematic of the stupid thinking and ignorance in society, by claiming no one uses Linux.
Consider Dan, that a significant portion of the 27 governments in the European Union are or have switched to Linux as well as South Africa and most countries in South America, especially Brazil. Even Russia is switching to Linux for it’s entire education system, and with similar thinking taking place in Asia.
Dan may not care what happens elsewhere – if he is in USA, but this rapidly growing adoption outside the USA will affect Google applications use – whether Google likes it or not.
Time to stop the ignorance and ridiculous statements.
Did someone wake up on the wrong side of the keyboard this morning? This was more likely a business decision, than a political statement against Linux. And given your complaint about the quality of the program, why would you even want it on Linux? The program sucks, but you are angry it doesn’t have a native linux version. That makes zero sense. Let the application die.
I don’t know about you guys, but I use picasa on all of my machines (which almost all run linux) because it’s:
1) Fast and Easy to quickly enhance and crop photos.
2) Simple to upload them to my google+ account.
3) Can recognize faces and then update my email contacts with user pictures automatically.
I’ve also setup most of my extended family with picasa for the same reasons, but they all run windows.
It’s driving me crazy that Google is eroding the Linux desktop experience by working with adobe to kill flash #1 and killing off picasa on linux #2.
Haters hating hater haters, I say to you.
Tormak: I’m with you. I find Picasa is as good as anything else I’ve tried, except that it excels in two departments: the first is managing a huuuuge database of files (223,000+) and the second is facial recognition. Find me a different Linux program that has both these things, and I’ll happily switch.
So far, the best “software” for handling the files is the system’s file manager, which does come with tools to see the pics. That being managed, it is then a matter of choosing the processing software, and that may depend on what you’re doing with the pictures.
Just install wine then install the windows 3.9 version.On my LinuxMint-12 system it auto-updated to version 135.9300 and works fine.
“Except one thing; Picasa was good at enhancing photos.”
Digikam is a pretty good editor. Though it’s one-button-fix isn’t as good, the changes you can place and the formats it will handle are all extremely good.
re: “But very few people use Linux ” Odd. Several scores of millions of users are “very few”.