So for quite some time, I've been using Google Picasa as my digital photo organizer on my desktop[1,2], and the exporting photos from it to Flickr[3] for my web albums (https://www.flickr.com/photos/the-consortium/collections). This process did everything I wanted it to, and I spent a lot of time building all of it up.
I've not always been diligent about keeping up with that effort, though. Some big vacations with thousands of photos, combined with the thousands of photos generated by my mobile phone, combined with my inherent laziness, has meant I'm way behind on my curating my photos and albums. Indeed, I was only about 3/4 of the way through our 2013 Africa pix when I stalled out last.
And then in early 2015, my hard drive crashed. I had to replace it, and when I did and reinstalled Picasa, it looked like all my album data had vanished. Photos were intact, but the curated albums, including for the first 12 days of our Africa trip, were gone. Ugh.
I poked at it over the last year, and was unable to fix it. But getting back from Austria/Germany this past weekend, I was bound and determined to make it work or just move on from there.
And, by heck, with a bit of research and a bit of random button pushing, I've actually managed to get it to work, and recovered my albums (short story: I was pointing to the wrong set of folders, and Picasa organizes its data in a really odd way).
So I will be curating those Austria/Germany pix and, with any luck, have them posted sometime in the not-measured-in-months future. (And then Africa. And then the house remodel. And then …)
Anyway, it made me very happy, and I wanted to share.
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[1] Yes, I want a desktop photo editor, metadata editor, location tagger and editor, and organizer. I want to keep my curated photos and albums on my desktop, because I don't want to run the risk of my web albums vanishing because some vendor decides to change what they are doing.
Also, everything is automagically backed up in Backblaze, in Google Photos, and (phone pix, at least) in Flickr. Not necessarily organized, but backed up. So the risk of loss of all my pictures is pretty low.
[2] Yes, I know that Picasa has been given the boot by Google and is no longer actively supported, damn their eyes. I will need to find a way to replace it, eventually, but it still works on Win10 (so far).
[3] Yes, I know that Yahoo! is in deep financial trouble and that Flickr is considered passe and that all of this could vanish tomorrow. See [1].
The Picasa application will continue to work on your desktop. There will never be another update to it. So save your install executable in a safe place. I don't know how you're syncing to Flickr with it but if it's using a Google service or API, that may break at some point.
I never really used Picasa as an organization tool, as I tend to use folder structure for that. I liked that I could sync to Picasa while keeping that structure. Can't do that with Google Photos.
+Nick McIntosh Yeah, I have a copy of the executable saved, and don't plan on upgrading my hard drive any time soon. I'd like to find a replacement for it before that happens.
I need to find the plug-in that did it again; it was less of a sync to Flickr than a built-in upload (allowing an upload to an album).
I could go to a folder structure (with some pain), but I like that Picasa lets me build albums that pull in files from multiple folders (e.g., "download from the red camera" + "downoad from the white camera" + "download from my phone").
Check out ACDSee. I've used it for 15 years. Indespensible